No Pain No Gain: The Beneficial Role of Consumer Effort in Decision Making


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Abstract

The overarching goal of this dissertation is to study the role of consumer effort within the context of online decision making. We show that consumer effort may not be necessarily malevolent and that some sources and measures of greater consumer effort can lead to beneficial outcomes. A better understanding of the role of consumer effort may help firms evaluate their investments in reducing consumer effort and justify the cost associated with implementing such strategies. First, we suggest that user effort reduction can be beneficial when it concerns the amount of information but not when it regards consumer involvement in the process of getting the information. These opposing effects can be attributed to the mediating role of content learning. Second, we use the complexity of the composition of the recommended choice set as a source of consumer effort and we propose that greater complexity increases objective consumer knowledge due to greater cognitive elaboration but decreases choice confidence and subjective product knowledge. Third, we examine the role of time as a measure of consumer effort in the context of online product recommendations. We distinguish between consumer inspection time-based effort at the choice set and at the product level and suggest that whereas at the choice set level, inspection time decreases website conversion, at the product level, greater inspection time has the opposite effect. Accordingly we suggest improvements on the composition of the recommended choice sets in a way that the allocation of consumers’ time spent is effectively balanced.
 
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Marisa van Iperen
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