The cost of richness

The effect of the size and diversity of decision sets on post-decision regret

Bibliographic Data

ID6203460
AuthorsAdi Sagi (Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yafo), Nehemia Friedland (Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yafo)
Year2007
Volume93
Issue4
Pages515-524
Publication date2007-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Personality and Social Psychology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0022-3514 • E-ISSN: 1939-1315
PublisherAmerican Psychological Association (APA) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1037/0022-3514.93.4.515
PMID17892329
OpenAlexW1973545889
LanguageEN
Citations received14
References cited33

Decision making is often made difficult by the knowledge that one has to live with the outcomes of one's choices and with the regret that these might engender. Formal theories propose that regret is proportional to the difference between the outcome of the option chosen and the expected outcome of the next best alternative that one may have chosen instead. It follows that the number of alternatives available for choice does not affect post-decisional regret. In this study, however, the authors proposed that regret is related to the comparison between the alternative chosen and the union of the positive attributes of the alternatives rejected. This general proposition yielded 2 hypotheses: (a) the larger number of alternatives from which one can choose and (b) the more diverse those alternatives are, the stronger the regret that an unsatisfactory choice would cause. These hypotheses were tested and supported by 4 experiments

Affect (linguistics) · Diversity (politics) · Economics · Epistemology · Microeconomics · Outcome (game theory) · Proposition · Regret · Sociology · Statistics · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics · Economic and Environmental Valuation · Forecasting Techniques and Applications · Mathematics · Psychology · Social Psychology

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