Understanding Consumer Decision Making for Complex Choices: The Effects of Individual and Contextual Factors

E-commerce consumers are facing increasingly complex purchasing decisions. Due to their cognitive capacity, however, consumers may not always achieve their goal of optimal product choice. Existing research has focused on providing aids to consumers to help them make rational and conscious information choices for complex purchasing decisions. Recently, a dual-process Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT) has suggested otherwise. It shows that due to the limited cognitive resources, unconscious information processing may outperform conscious information processing for complex decisions. Drawing on the UTT, the study proposes that strategically designed interventions would interact with other contextual and individual factors in consumer information processing, and ultimately lead to superior consumer choice under certain choice environment. An experiment was conducted to test the research model. Focusing on the unconscious information processing in online shopping, this study has important implications for Web-specific human-computer interaction research and e-commerce