The Effect of Resource Depletion on Deciding on Product Assortments Size

Purpose – Prior research has suggested that consumers typically prefer to have a larger number of options. However, preference of assortment size may depend on how depleted resources in consumers’ mind are. Reduced capacity for self-regulation by resource depletion makes people rely on more intuitive and less effortful decision processing. When they are mentally depleted, people are likely to focus on the choice difficulty from large assortment, which leads to preference for the small assortment when they make a decision. It could be an important question potentially how being in a depleted mode through effortful self-regulation will influence on the evaluation of assortment size. To answer this questioner, we hypothesized that being engaged in self-regulation, as compared with not being engaged in self-regulation, will influence on the evaluation of product assortment size such as attractiveness, difficulty of choice, and anticipated regret. Research design, data, and methodology – In this study, we first manipulated self-regulatory resource availability using a self-regulation task (i.e., instructing participants to solve Sudoku puzzle vs. to solve diagram cube by filling any diagrams that they prefer into cube instead of number) and asked to indicate the difficulty of the tasks available to them ("How much difficulty did you feel when you complete the task?") Next, participants were asked to imagine that they were planning to buy a laptop at one of the two stores (small assortment: 6 options vs. large assortment: 30 options), both offering good quality of products. After reading the product descriptions, participants were instructed to consider all the information and choose a store that they would like to shop. Finally we measured the choice difficulty, evaluation of product assortments, and anticipated regret on a 7-point scale. We conducted two-way ANOVA in testing the main hypothesis that depleted consumers will show poorer subsequent self-con