A Better Test of Choice Overload

• Tác giả: Mark Dean, Dilip Ravindran, Jörg Stoye
• Ngôn ngữ: eng
• Ký hiệu phân loại: 153.932 Conscious mental processes and intelligence
• Thông tin xuất bản: 2022
• Bộ sưu tập: Metadata
• ID: 196198

Tóm tắt

Choice overload - by which larger choice sets are detrimental to a chooser's wellbeing - is potentially of great importance to the design of economic policy. Yet the current evidence on its prevalence is inconclusive. We argue that existing tests are likely to be underpowered and hence that choice overload may occur more often than the literature suggests. We propose more powerful tests based on richer data and characterization theorems for the Random Utility Model. These new approaches come with significant econometric challenges, which we show how to address. We apply our tests to new experimental data and find strong evidence of choice overload that would likely be missed using current approaches.