Consideration Set
The shortlist of products a shopper compares in depth after screening a larger range.
What it is
Gerald Häubl and Valerie Trifts described online shopping in 2000 as a two-stage process of screening many products and then comparing a shortlist. On this site it is read alongside Choice Overload and Decision Task Difficulty.
In effect
In a controlled experiment in a simulated online store, a recommendation agent that screened products against stated preferences reduced the size of the consideration set while raising its quality. A comparison matrix for side-by-side comparison also reduced set size and raised quality.
What it does not say
It is not the same thing as Choice Overload, which sits close to it on this site but describes a different part of how people decide. It also does not say that the finding reaches every product, buyer or setting; where this page goes beyond the cited research, the step is an inference and is labelled as one.
Sources
- Gerald Häubl is first author, with Valerie Trifts, of Consumer decision making in online shopping environments: The effects of interactive decision aids, published in Marketing Science in 2000.
- Valerie Trifts is co-author, with Gerald Häubl, of Consumer decision making in online shopping environments: The effects of interactive decision aids, published in Marketing Science in 2000.