Overestimating the Importance of the Given Information in Multiattribute Consumer Judgment
David Sanbonmatsu and colleagues argue that consumers often judge products with incomplete information, and that their judgments are insensitive to how much information they have, partly because they overweight the attributes they are given. In three experiments with undergraduates, attributes that had been presented about a touring bicycle were rated as more important than attributes that had not, evaluations of a compact car were more extreme when it was judged alone than beside a comparison car described on other attributes, and a pruned list of attributes produced a much larger share of importance for the presented attributes than a full list did. Overweighting was reduced by product knowledge, by thinking about one's own criteria first and by a comparison product. Confidence differences were not significant in the second and third experiments.
David Sanbonmatsu and colleagues argue that consumers often judge products with incomplete information, and that their judgments are insensitive to how much information they have, partly because they overweight the attributes they are given. In three experiments with undergraduates, attributes that had been presented about a touring bicycle were rated as more important than attributes that had not, evaluations of a compact car were more extreme when it was judged alone than beside a comparison car described on other attributes, and a pruned list of attributes produced a much larger share of importance for the presented attributes than a full list did. Overweighting was reduced by product knowledge, by thinking about one's own criteria first and by a comparison product. Confidence differences were not significant in the second and third experiments.
Written from the full text of the paper read 2026-10-27 at the second author's university page; DOI from Crossref.
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Sanbonmatsu, D. M., Kardes, F. R., Houghton, D. C., Ho, E. A., & Posavac, S. S. (2003). Overestimating the importance of the given information in multiattribute consumer judgment. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 13(3), 289-300.