Rainer Greifeneder
Rainer Greifeneder is a psychologist listed at the University of Mannheim on the 2009 Psychology & Marketing paper on the too-much-choice effect. He is a co-author, with Benjamin Scheibehenne and Todd, of that paper and of the 2010 Journal of Consumer Research meta-analysis of choice overload.
Who they are
Greifeneder studies judgement and decision-making. The 2010 meta-analysis also reports a 2008 chocolate study of his among those that found no overload effect.
This page records only what the papers and their published records state. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.
Key papers
What moderates the too-much-choice effect? (2009), Scheibehenne, Greifeneder and Todd. Three studies, 598 participants; only having to justify the choice proved an effective moderator.
Can there ever be too many options? (2010), Scheibehenne, Greifeneder and Todd. 63 conditions, 50 experiments and 5,036 participants; a mean effect virtually zero, slight publication bias in favour of overload results, and fewer positive results in recent experiments.
Key ideas
The central idea is that choice overload is not a general law. Large assortments reduce choosing in some studies and increase it in others, and the average is close to nothing. That is the record any advice to cut a product range has to answer.
Sources
- Scheibehenne, B., Greifeneder, R., & Todd, P. M. (2009). What moderates the too-much-choice effect? Psychology & Marketing, 26(3), 229-253. doi:10.1002/mar.20271
- Scheibehenne, B., Greifeneder, R., & Todd, P. M. (2010). Can there ever be too many options? A meta-analytic review of choice overload. Journal of Consumer Research, 37(3), 409-425. doi:10.1086/651235