On the Relationship between Interactive Decision Aids and Decision Strategies: A Theoretical Analysis

The amount of Internet sales has been growing at a high and constant rate over the last years. Many customers use Internet shops on a regular basis. Internet shops ensure a high transparency on product properties (including prices) and customers are able to easily compare a large number of products (options) and choose the one that best fits their expectations. During the decision process, customers apply decision strategies which describe the way on how they choose among different options. In the literature, a large variety of decision strategies is discussed. In Internet shops, customers are usually confronted with comparison matrixes where the properties of different products are visualized and compared in a table. To help the customers to choose the right product from such a matrix, Internet shops often use interactive decision aids like sorting of products, dropping products or product properties, or performing pairwise comparisons between products. Such decision aids should reduce the complexity of the decision task and help the customers to find the product that best fulfils their expectations. This paper studies the relationship between the decision strategy used by a customer and the proper electronic decision aid that should help the customer to choose among the different products. In particular, it answers the question which type of interactive decision aid is necessary to apply specific decision strategies in Internet shops. Based on the analysis, web designers can adapt their Internet shops and offer those decision aids that fit best to the decision strategy of the customers and make their decision process easier and more precise. Since previous empirical results on the frequency of the use of decision strategies in the Internet indicate that only a few decision strategies are preferred by Internet customers, the paper is able to make recommendations on which electronic decision aids are mandatory for web shops.