Effects of Choice Contrast and Order Sequence on Consumer Judgment and Decision in Comparison- Shopping Assisted Environment

Comparison-Shopping (CS) websites, such as mySimon.com, assist consumers in managing the vast amount of information offered by multiple retailers on the Internet. Conventional wisdom would have dictated that the provision of the best set of alternatives by CS websites should lead to high consumer satisfaction and purchase propensity. However, consumers may experience decision difficulty to choose among alternatives that are nondominated (i.e., none of the alternative is inferior for all product attributes). Consequently, they may simply avoid making a decision by not committing to any purchase. Grounded on behavioral and context-dependent decisionmaking literature, this paper builds a model that explores the effects of choice content and choice order sequence on consumer behavior and explains how they can potentially alleviate the difficulty of making purchase decisions