Constructive Choice
The view that consumer choice is built at the moment of choosing rather than read off stored preferences.
What it is
James Bettman, Mary Frances Luce and John Payne argued in 1998 that, with limited processing capacity, consumers often lack well-defined preferences and assemble them using strategies that depend on the demands of the task. On this site it is read alongside Dual-Process Theory, Habitual, Limited and Extended Decision Making and Consumer Behavior Model.
In effect
The number of options on a shelf and the effort each comparison takes can change the strategy a buyer uses, and so which option wins.
What it does not say
It is not the same thing as Dual-Process Theory, 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
- See the article listed above for the work this page draws on.