تعدیل اثر اندازه طبقه بندی بر رضایتمندی انتخاب با عاطفه مثبت

The present research proposes that positive affect mitigates choice overload. Results from four studies show that whereas people in neutral affect feel less satisfied when choosing from a large relative to a small assortment, people in positive affect do not experience a decline in satisfaction and may even feel more satisfied when choosing from a large, relative to a small assortment. It is proposed that positive affect has these effects by shifting people's attention from the difficulty of the choice task to the quality of the assortment, as a basis for judgment of choice satisfaction.

Many firms nowadays pursue a strategy of product proliferation. For example, Garnier has 34 hair care and 28 hair styling products (not including hair color), Crest and Colgate offer more than 35 types of toothpaste, and Celestial Seasonings offers 55 varieties of tea. Similarly, retailers such as Best Buy, Wegmans, or Toys “R” Us carry hundreds of brands and product varieties in their assortment. Such a strategy benefits both firms and consumers in a number of ways. From the firm's point of view, for example, broad product lines and assortments represent an opportunity to cater to a wider range of consumer tastes (Lancaster 1990), and thus target broader and more diverse consumer segments (Moorthy 1984). From the consumers’ point of view, extended product assortments allow for more accurate matching of individual preferences and can even provide a sense of personal freedom (Levav and Zhu 2009). Pursuing a broad product line or assortment strategy, however, can have serious downsides. For example, managers often find that the better part of their sales is accounted for by only a small fraction of the offerings in their portfolio. At the individual consumer level, extensive assortments have been found to lead to deferred decision making and lower purchase rates, as well as to weaker preferences for the chosen option – a phenomenon labeled “choice overload.” In recent years a growing number of articles have addressed the choice overload issue (see Scheibehenne, Greifeneder, and Todd 2010 for a review). The focus has shifted from documenting the phenomenon to clarifying the underlying mechanism and identifying potential moderators (see Chernev, Böckenholt, and Goodman 2010). The present research introduces positive affect as a moderator of the relationship between assortment size and choice satisfaction. We propose that positive affect mitigates the negative consequences of choice overload, thus allowing firms to take advantage of the attractive features of extended product lines. The next section outlines the theoretical reasoning behind these propositions.