“When is too much choice a bad thing?” is up for discussion in this front page story on the 2008 Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences. The argument put forward appears to be individuals that are given more choices do not necessarily obtain a result that is optimal for their preferences. In the era of “access to information,” individuals may find themselves unaware of the trade-offs that they are making. (e.g. A child should be given choices within healthy eating options rather than being given the choice of what to eat because children may not understand the consequences of eating, say, candy exclusively).

In retail transactions, I recall a friend of mine (A) was buying golf clubs through an employee purchase plan of his friend (B) who worked for the Canadian distributor. Like many employee purchase plans, you can get great stuff cheap, but you have to know exactly what you want. (Imagined phone dialogue; B is inputting data online.)

A – I want Driver, 3-wood and 3-iron through SW of Such-n-Such model.

B- Great. Right-handed; Standard length and lie, right?

A – You got it.

B – What shaft flex do you want?

A – Regular.

B – Where do you want the kick point?

A – What is that?

Obviously, you need a degree of sophistication to buy golf clubs this way; it’s the Dell model of “tell us exactly what you want; you will get it cheap.” I am afraid that cheap overshadows the value that others can add by making some decisions for you: “I shoot in the mid to high nineties. I tend to slice my driver, fairway woods and long irons. I will hit a good drive 280; and from 150 yards out, I swing a 6 iron. What have you got for me?” The knowledgeable retailer can steer me in the right direction, and gently try to sell me the clubs that are at the upper end of my budget, but I have to be ready to pay a little more.

The trends that remove the value-added information in return for lower costs (which is usually the trade-off), gives people more choice because they choose to choose. Do they realize that if you don’t know enough to choose what’s right, your satisfaction hinges on choosers being able to say “Can you tell me the difference between the two?” and choice-offerers having the knowledge to say, “Your choice here is really a trade-off between A or B?”

It may be the old claim that you can have it “cheap, good or fast, but you have to choose two of three,” re-written as “do the work up front to know what you need, then tell me; OR pay a little more and I will translate your wants into what you need.” Again, trust has no small role in these exchanges because you have to trust that the person is looking out for your best interest more than their best interest.

There should be no mystery as to why more choice reduces satisfaction. It takes a lot of work to be informed enough to make those decisions.

Tagged as: Trade-offs; Choices; Trust

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