Tim Harford - the nemesis of behavioral economists - explains why new research seems to show that this most heralded and cited of recent ideas is, well, of dubious substance:
Benjamin Scheibehenne, a psychologist at the University of Basel, was thinking along these lines when he decided...to design a range of experiments to figure out when choice demotivates, and when it does not.
But a curious thing happened almost immediately. They began by trying to replicate some classic experiments – such as the jam study, and a similar one with luxury chocolates. They couldn’t find any sign of the “choice is bad” effect. Neither the original Lepper-Iyengar experiments nor the new study appears to be at fault: the results are just different and we don’t know why. After designing 10 different experiments in which participants were asked to make a choice, and finding very little evidence that variety caused any problems, Scheibehenne and his colleagues tried to assemble all the studies, published and unpublished, of the effect. The average of all these studies suggests that offering lots of extra choices seems to make no important difference either way
(via Tyler Cowen, who saw this coming)
