Interruptions are Not All Bad! The Case of Choice Overload

Abstract

Early studies typically hold a negative view of interrupting website features (e.g., pop-ups and floating advertisements) because they may cause annoyance for consumers and disrupt their processing flow. The current short paper offers a novel insight into a potential benefit of interrupting website features – alleviating the choice overload effect, because of two theoretical lines of reasoning: (1) people usually adopt a bottom-up, data-driven mode to process product assortment information by default, and thus, a large assortment induces more comparisons across options and greater experience of choice difficulty; (2) people’s information processing may change from a bottom-up, data-driven to a top-down, goal-directed mode to focus more on their pre-existing goals rather than the available assortment information. An initial study has been conducted to confirm our propositions. Two future studies, one of which will adopt neuroscience technology (i.e., ERPs), are designed to provide more stringent evidence. Full paper available at https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2019/behavior_is/behavior_is/33/