Sun Qizhang - room A34 - 12:30-14:00

Advice in too much choice

Do people prefer more options or less? The research by Iyengar and Lepper (2000) showed that people suffer from having too much choice. Hence, more is less if a decision has to be made in this situation. On a separate note, much research has been done on advice taking. Nevertheless, how people behave when they have a chance to get help from an advisor in a too-much-choice decision situation has not yet been explored. In our study, participants were given either 4 (smaller set size) or 30 (larger set size) options in eight-trial gambles. The services of four advisors who charged differently were offered. All the advice given were random, which was not pointed out to the participants. They could choose any advisor they wanted and pay for it. Otherwise, they could choose not to ask for the advice. Set size influenced advice enquiry, advice taking and experiment performance. For those who had more options, they were more likely to ask for the advice and asked for a more expensive advice, but they were not more likely to take the advice. In addition, the large set size group performed worse than with a smaller set size.