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Decision Support Systems
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Understanding online purchase decision making: The effects of unconscious thought,information quality, and information quantity
Jie Gao a, Cheng Zhang b,⁎, Ke Wang b, Sulin Ba c
a Graduate School of Art and Science, Columbia University, New York, 10027, United Statesb School of Management, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200433, Chinac School of Business, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269-1041, United States
The prosperity of online shopping has led e-commerce vendors to provide increasingly rich information, partic-ularly for experience products, to enhance consumers' shopping experience and satisfaction. However, there islittle awareness that consumers may not be able to process all the information available because of humanbeings' limited information processing capacity. Online shoppers could be easily confusedwhen facing rich infor-mation, particularly when the amount of information greatly exceeds their processing capacity. In contrast toprevious researchwhich has focused on the formatting of information or user interfaces to solve the informationoverload problem, this study explores a new solution based on the role of unconscious thought. Integrating in-formation processing theory and the unconscious thought theory, the current study examines the differentroles of information quantity, information quality and thought mode in consumers' decision satisfaction, in thepresence of rich information. Our results show that unconscious thoughtmoderates the relationship between in-formation quality and consumer satisfaction towards their decisionmakingwhen shopping experience productsonline, and is thus worthy of special attention in the design of e-commerce websites. The study contributes toboth unconscious thought theory and information processing theory by exploring the interaction effect of thequantity and quality of information with thought mode in affecting the quality of purchasing decisions.
Taking advantage of the Internet's capacity to convey rich informa-tion to consumers easily and quickly is crucial to e-commerce success.Much information systems (IS) research on e-commerce has focusedon providingmore “good” information to satisfy users [36,38,43]. How-ever, the ever increasing amount of information could be challenging toconsumers' limited processing capacity. From this point of view, provid-ingmore information to consumersmay not guarantee better consumersatisfaction.
This situation is especially unfavorable for online experience prod-uct purchases. Experience products such as clothes, movies, andmusic are dominated by attributes that are inherently subjective.These products are characterized by uncertainty and equivocalityand are difficult to evaluate. These characteristics make purchasingexperience products online a much more complex task compared tothe task of purchasing search products. Moreover, the current onlineshopping environment is not an ideal venue for experience productsas the uncertainty contained in this venue pushes vendors to providemuch information concerning the experience product regardless of
the limited information processing capacity of its consumers. It is pos-sible that adding even one more piece of information may trigger anegative effect like information overload [18,49]. Therefore, it is im-portant to provide practical guidance to vendors on how to deliverthe available information effectively and improve consumers' satis-faction on experience products.
These considerations lead to the following research questions:(1) given the limited information processing capacity of consumers, whatis an effectiveway of presenting product information to improve the qualityof consumer decisionswhen purchasing online? and (2)what kind of infor-mation contributes to this improvement on decision quality?
Recent research on unconscious thoughts sheds light on this prob-lem and suggests the existence of two mechanisms that people use toprocess information: conscious thought and unconscious thought[19]. Conscious thought refers to the thought processes one is awareof and can introspect on, whereas unconscious thought involves cog-nitive and/or affective task-relevant processes that take place outsideconscious awareness [14]. The key concept to distinguish consciousand unconscious thought lies in the word “attention” as stated inthe Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT). Conscious thought is thoughtwith attention focused on the task while unconscious thought refersto the process of solving problems with attention distracted to otherirrelevant tasks [15]. The difference between how these two thoughtprocesses work led to the development of UTT, which posits that the
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unconscious mind is capable of performing tasks outside of one'sawareness. UTT suggests that unconscious thought can help con-sumers achieve better performance in complex tasks [16]. While pre-vious literature assumes that conscious thought is accurate andsystematic in nature, recent studies find that unconscious thoughthas superiority over conscious thought in complex problem-solving[17]. The nearly unlimited processing capacity of unconsciousthought, as suggested by UTT, enables consumers to process largeamounts of information. Another advantage of unconscious thoughtover conscious thought, especially in complex situations, is thatunconscious thought uses a bottom-up principle while consciousthought typically is a top-down process [15]. This implies that con-scious thought leads people to concentrate on the stereotype formedbefore making a decision while unconscious thought makes con-sumers form an impression based on the available information. Inthis way, unconscious thought can lead to better integration of all in-formation [15] and help consumers form reasonable expectations,which may lead to higher satisfaction after purchase of experienceproducts.
A different research stream, i.e., the information processing literature,concludes that information quality and information quantity are amongthe most important factors that affect decision quality [26,32,41,46].However, thought mode has never been examined by this stream of lit-erature. Though UTT has examined the effect of information quantity onunconscious thought in the early studies, the UTT literature leaves therole of information quality unexplored. To fill these gaps, we simulatean online experience product decision-making process and examinethe interaction effects of information quantity, information quality andthought mode on decision quality.
This paper contributes to the literature in several ways. First, thisresearch explores a way to effectively improve decision-making satis-faction of online experience products. Secondly, the research extendsUTT by integrating information processing theory. Since the introduc-tion of UTT, much attention has focused on whether the deliberation-without-attention (DWA) effect truly exists [50] as well as its associ-ation with the online interruptions such as pop-up advertisements[8,37,58]. However, few studies have considered the combination ofUTT and information processing theory. Therefore, the current studymay reveal the working function of UTT on decision quality underdifferent information situations. More specifically, we examine thejoint effect of information quantity, information quality and thoughtmodes on decision quality. Third, we explore a possible boundaryfor the application of UTT on different product types. When decisionmaking is dominated by product attributes that are difficult to evalu-ate or involve lots of uncertainty, consumers using unconsciousthought could take advantage of its almost infinite processing capac-ity and bottom-up principle to form a better understanding of theproducts. In this way, unconscious thought can help consumers to ob-tain a reasonable expectation and thus higher satisfaction. However,when making decisions on products that consumers are familiar with,customers can sometimes selectively ignore information provided dueto personal experience, thus reducing the effect of information over-load. As a result, conscious thoughts are capable of processing the infor-mation and unconscious thoughtmay notwork as effectively under thiskind of situations. In order to explore this difference, we conducted anadditional experiment on search products. Results indicate the specificeffects of UTT on experience product.
2. Literature review
Two streams of research have attempted to answer the researchquestions. One concerns the application of information processingtheory to explore how quantity and quality of information affect thequality of purchasing decisions [4,28,32,52]. The other stream con-cerns the application of unconscious thought theory (UTT) to explorehow information is processed unconsciously [15]. Though these theories
belong to different fields, their fundamental assumption and ultimategoals are the same. Both theories acknowledge humans' limited infor-mation processing capacity and explore how to improve consumerdecision-making quality under this limitation. In online commerce, al-though Internet enables retailers to present an abundance of informa-tion, experience products are usually dominated by attributes aboutwhich the information is difficult to process, making purchasing experi-ence products online a complex task. Therefore, it is necessary to con-sider both theories to investigate consumers' decision making whenpurchasing online experience products.
2.1. Information processing theory
When consumers make decisions about purchasing a product ora service, they must go through three decision-making steps includ-ing intelligence, design, and choice. In the intelligence phase, thedecision-maker recognizes the problem and gathers information[54]. In the design phase, the problem is structured, criteria areformed, and various alternative solutions are identified [1,4,12].During the choice phase, the decision-maker chooses the best alter-native that meets the criteria and makes the final decision [54].Though researchers have developed several methods that can im-prove the interpretation of information, such as vivid presentation[56], there is still a dearth of research concerning how to helpdecision-makers integrate their needs with perceived information.
It is generally acknowledged that humans have limited informa-tion processing capacity as research has shown the span of informa-tion processing for human beings is between 5 and 9 chunks [41].Thus, complex tasks cause confusion and restrain the ability to pro-cess, respond, and perceive information [51]. This effect may furthercause individuals shopping online to focus narrowly on a subset ofthe information while ignoring other information which may be rele-vant, resulting in a suboptimal purchasing decision [58,59].
Effective information processing depends on the quality andquantity of the information and how the information is processed,among other things. Accordingly, the strategies researchers haveemployed to improve information processing efficiency include improv-ing the quality of the information [2,55], exploring decision-support sys-tems [12], and introducing specific goals [3,11]. The achievement ofthese goals should increase the satisfaction of decision-making; howev-er, their success has been limited so far.
2.2. Unconscious thought theory
Recently, a dual-process theory has emerged that intends to pro-vide a solution to the processing capacity problem. As discussedabove, researchers are aware of two distinct modes of informationprocessing: conscious thought and unconscious thought [19]. Underconscious thought, one is consciously aware of the task, whereas un-conscious thought refers to cognitive and/or affective task-processingthat takes place outside conscious awareness [14]. Different from in-tuition, which tends to be random and unpredictable, unconsciousthought is a goal-dependent process used to solve problems andincludes the ability for an individual to return to the original taskafter the distraction [7,17].
Each thoughtmode applies to a particular circumstance. Most infor-mation processing theories assume conscious thought only, which sug-gests that people are systematic information processors and are unableto deal with complex tasks [2,32]. Researchers have found unconsciousthought to be more unpredictable and unsystematic than consciousthought, thereby leading to poor decisions [15,54]. This thesis changedafter the discovery of the DWA effect of unconscious thought, whichshows that people often do not make good decisions after careful (con-scious) thought in a complex task environment; rather, it is sometimesbetter to “sleep on it” [17,53]. The UTT suggests that unconsciousthought can deal with a combination of information better than
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conscious thought because of its large processing capacity and its abilityto better organize the information [15]. The fundamentalmechanism ofUTT is defined by the capacity principle, which states that unconsciousthought, unlike conscious thought, is not constrained by low processingcapacity and, consequently, can deal betterwith complicated tasks [15].Later, with the research going deeper, UTT also developed severalunique explanations including the bottom-up versus top-down princi-ple and weighting principle for the advantage of unconscious overconscious thought on complex decisions. Table 1 summarizes the funda-mental principles of UTT.
The current study primarily focuses on the bottom-up principle ofunconscious thought, which argues that consumers form a generalidea of the product based on available information but without pre-determined criteria. As conscious thought follows the top-down prin-ciple, the consciousness is better at filtering irrelevant informationand reaching a specific goal. Therefore, when consumers performconscious thought, there may already exist a pre-dominant image ofthe product, at which point the mind rules out unsuitable images [15].However, this process involves compromise and hardly can the pre-dominant image be exactly realized. This inconsistency can furthercause a negative effect on consumer satisfaction. For unconsciousthought, which works bottom-up, there is no bias prior to examiningthe information. Rather, unconscious thought integrates every pieceof information in a more polarized and better organized way, whichhelps people make better decisions [15].
2.3. Product type
Information economics studies suggest that a product can be clas-sified by the degree to which pre-consumption search enables theconsumer to evaluate the product [44]. Search products are thosedominated by attributes for which full information can be acquiredprior to consumption, whereas experience products are dominatedby attributes that are not known until the purchase and use of theproduct [33]. Researchers have demonstrated that evaluating searchand experience attributes involves different levels of effort and thatthe quantity of information examined is greater for experience prod-ucts than for search products [25]. Search attributes (e.g., weight) areobjective, diagnostic, and easy to compare, whereas experience attri-butes (e.g., flowers' smell) are inherently subjective, characterized byuncertainty and equivocality, and are difficult to evaluate. In particu-lar, information about search attributes is typically presented in astraightforward manner and requires less time to process [42].Comparatively, obtaining understanding about experience attributesmay involve reading consumer ratings and feedback, inspecting prod-ucts, and so on [22,25,60]. Because information about experience
Table 1Fundamental principles of the unconscious thought theory (UTT) [15].
Principles Points of view
Capacity principle Conscious thought is constrained by the low capacityof consciousness, whereas unconscious thought has amuch higher capacity.
Bottom-up-versus-top-down principle
Conscious thought leads people to concentrate on thestereotype formed before making a decision (top-down) while unconscious thought makes consumersform an impression based on the available information(bottom-up).
Weighting principle Unconscious thought naturally weights the relativeimportance of different attributes of information,whereas conscious thought often leads to suboptimalweighting.
Rule principle Conscious thought can follow strict rules and isprecise, whereas unconscious thought gives onlyrough estimates.
Convergence-versus-divergence principle
Conscious thought is focused and convergent, whereasunconscious thought is more divergent.
attributes is usually highly idiosyncratic, consumers must combineinformation from different sources to determine the overall value ofa product alternative, evaluate attributes at a more abstract level, orrestructure information to make it comparable [13,29,30]. More gen-erally, the increased uncertainty, associated with experience attri-butes, increases the information amount consumers need to process,resulting in a more complex task than with search products.
3. Model and hypothesis development
We focus on the interaction effects between information quantity,information quality and thought modes on decision quality for expe-rience products. The results help researchers and practitioners under-stand how to improve decision quality of online purchases ofexperience products. In addition, the research also explores theboundaries of thought modes.
Different from objective decisions like operational quiz solving, itis usually hard to find an objective measurement for consumers' deci-sion quality as they have different needs for experience product shop-ping. Rather, a good decision is largely reflected by customersatisfaction, which makes customer satisfaction a reasonable repre-sentation for decision quality. In decision-making literatures, it isalso commonly assumed that better purchasing decisions lead togreater customer satisfaction [8]. This assumption implies that peoplewho have made a good decision often experience a higher level of sat-isfaction during and after the process compared to those who made apoor decision. Thus, in this study we use customer satisfaction as aproxy for decision quality. It has been shown that satisfaction couldbe divided into two dimensions according to the different momentin the decision making process, pre- and post-consumption satisfac-tion [45]. Pre-consumption satisfaction about one's decision, i.e. decisionsatisfaction, reveals consumers' overall feeling towards information pro-vided and processes they used tomake a decision. The second dimensionis post-consumption satisfaction, which is generated after the use of theproduct or service. We measure post-consumption satisfaction by exam-ining whether the subjects are willing to recommend the products toothers [34].
3.1. Interaction effect between information quantity and thought mode
Chen et al. [10] found that a large quantity of information plays apositive role in consumers' purchasing decisions. However, otherstudies have shown that increasing the quantity of information candecrease processing efficiency due to information overload [18,49].The current study addresses the relationship between informationquantity and thought mode.
The quantity of information is primarily defined by two dimen-sions: the number of choices and the amount of information perchoice [10,27]. The performance (i.e., the quality of decisions or rea-soning in general) of an individual initially correlates positivelywith the amount of information he or she receives—up to a certainpoint [18]. When the number of alternatives increases and whenthe number of attributes per alternative increases and exceeds theprocessing capacity of human beings, the choice accuracy decreases,implying a Bell-shape relationship between decision quality andinformation quantity [39,46].
However, the results stated above are based on the assumption thatinformation is processed by conscious thought. According to recent re-search on UTT, the decision efficiency made under unconscious thoughtwill not decrease with an increase of information quantity [16]. The phe-nomenon, addressed as deliberation-without-attention (DWA), is gen-erally explained by the large capacity of the processing channel withinunconscious thought [15]. Other plausible explanations (e.g., bottom-up principle and weighting principle) have also been summarized inthe literature. Due to the high processing capacity of unconsciousthought, a positive relationship between information quantity and
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decision quality is highly possible since more information can lead tobetter understanding of the product and thus a better choice. Therefore,combining the theories of information processing and unconsciousthought, it is likely that there exists an interaction effect between infor-mation quantity and thought mode on decision quality.
More specifically, in the situation of conscious thought when mak-ing a decision, people systematically analyze the attributes of prod-ucts that assist in making effective decisions. However, consumersare often times exposed to more information than they are capableof processing when making decisions on experience products. Conse-quently, consumers are likely to suffer from an unreasonable weightof information and focus on unimportant information when beingconstantly exposed to information, which can lead to unreasonableexpectations. Thus, after using the product, the inconsistency be-tween expectations and the actual product can result in low satisfac-tion. On the other hand, consumers have much larger processingcapacities under unconscious thought and, therefore, are able to pro-cess more information and reach a better understanding of the prod-uct, which can reduce the difference between expectations and theactual product, resulting in higher satisfaction for consumers. There-fore, we propose the following hypotheses:
H1a. When one purchases experience products using unconsciousthought, the higher the information quantity, the higher his or her de-cision satisfaction.
H1b. When one purchases experience products using unconsciousthought, the higher the information quantity, the higher his or herpost-consumption satisfaction.
Fig. 1. Research model and hypotheses. +/− refers to the hypothesized positive/negative relationship between the constructs.
3.2. Interaction effect between information quality and thought mode
An important factor affecting the effectiveness of decision makingusing conscious thought is the quality of information. Informationquality is defined as the usefulness of the available informationabout an attribute of a product in helping a decision maker evaluatethe product. In existing experiments, information quality is measuredby the cumulative importance of the attribute information [9,32].
Consumers, when under conscious thought, are constantly ex-posed to information that may cause a distraction from relevant attri-butes compared to when they are under unconscious thought. Thedistraction of unimportant information may lead to unreasonablyassigning weight to attributes, which prevents the consumers fromencoding the essentials of the decision, thus leading the consumerto irrationally evaluate the products [51]. Moreover, consciousthought is believed to act top-down, which essentially involves for-ming stereotypes according to previous knowledge and thus canbias a decision. As online experience products are always presentedwith rich information, consumers need to consider various importantfeatures. Thus, with a limited capacity of working memory, it is diffi-cult for consumers to develop a perfect combination of attributes tofit the standards formed according to their own experiences. Fallingin line with this rationale is the notion that whatever alternative out-come one tries to predict or to recall from past failures of achieving agoal, it is impossible for the person to accurately reflect the real goaland preference actually desired. This characteristic of consumer be-havior makes decision making for experience products, using con-scious thought, highly undesirable. In contrast, consumers underunconscious thought examine all attributes with more reasonableweight and form a general idea of the product without pre-determining the choice criteria. This helps consumers obtain an accu-rate assessment of the product and reduce the inconsistency betweenexpectation and the real product and further lead to higher satisfac-tion and an increase in decision quality. Thus, we posit the followinghypotheses:
H2a. When one purchases experience products using unconsciousthought, the higher the information quality, the higher his or her de-cision satisfaction.
H2b. When one purchases experience products using unconsciousthought, the higher the information quality, the higher his or herpost-consumption satisfaction.
The full research model is shown in Fig. 1.
4. Research methods
We test the research hypotheses using two controlled laboratoryexperiments. One involves movies as the experience product andthe other toothbrushes, a search product, as an additional comparisonto movies to explore the effect of unconscious thought on differentproducts. In the experiments we consider 3 factors, each with 2 levels,as shown in Table 2.
The subjects' gender, age, and major information, i.e., whether thesubjects are from literal arts or science departments, are collected ascontrol variables. As literature reveals, the success of consciousthought and unconscious thought manipulation relies on the subjects'attention shift. This study follows strictly the manipulation proce-dures in the original series of UTT experiments and subsequent re-peated experiments (e.g. [9,14–17]). The procedures are designed toenhance subjects' attention shift, such as goal-dependence andneed-for-cognition, or to avoid noises of other effects, such as timepressure and interruption.
4.1. Experimental designs and procedures
4.1.1. Experiment 1The first experiment involves an experience product: movies. Stu-
dents were asked to pick their favorite movie from a collection ofeight movies after reading about the movies. Then they watched thechosen movie for 20 min and rated it. To decrease the effect of indi-vidual movie difference, we chose eight out of 50 historical documen-taries from www.imdb.com, an authoritative website for movieinformation. Together with information from other movie websites,we generate information sets of the eight films.
Before the experiment, 20 people were invited to read all informa-tion about the films. Then they were asked to write down their mostfavorite film to watch among the eight films. We recorded their read-ing time and decision time, respectively. We chose one standard devi-ation above the mean of reading/decision time as the sufficientreading/decision time respectively in later experiments. The readingtime, i.e., 15 s per piece of information, is consistent with previous re-search. Having sufficient reading and decision time prevents the sub-jects from being hurried by the time constraint [24] that may causeworrisome thoughts for a task [20]. After watching the movie theyhad chosen, we asked them to rate the movie and the importance of
Thought mode Conscious thought mode andunconscious thought mode
Information quantity High level and low levelInformation quality High quality and low quality
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each information attribute for their decision making on a 10-pointscale, following the procedure of Keller and Staelin [32]. The impor-tance score for each attribute was obtained by averaging the rankedattribute scores over all individuals, with first rank referring to themost important attribute. The higher the importance ranking scoreis, the higher the quality of the attribute is. The results are reportedin Appendix 1. In this way, we can operationalize high/low impor-tance ranking score movie attributes to form the high/low informa-tion quality set of web pages respectively. The information quantityis operationalized by the number of distinct movie attributes. Finally,we obtained four information sets with varying levels of informationquantity and quality, summarized in Table 3.
To imitate an online shopping environment, we created a frontpage to list all the 8 films' names and posters with hyperlinks, asshown in Appendix 2. Clicking on a movie's name and poster willlead the subjects to the movie's main page which also has hyperlinksto jump back. The subjects could review the films one-by-one inwhatever order they chose.
In the experiment, 160 students were recruited and randomlyassigned to the eight experimental conditions, with 20 per group. Atthe start of the experiment, all subjects were clearly instructedabout their job, namely to choose the film they preferred most froma collection of eight movies based on the movie information provided.They were asked to study the information carefully. This procedurewas intended to promote goal-dependence, which, in turn, wasintended to facilitate a later shift to unconscious thought [7].
Then the subjects were asked to begin reading all the informationabout the eight movies and get general impressions about them. Toavoid undue pressure [57], they were given sufficient time (12 min)to finish the reading. Next, the students were told to choose thefilm they would most like to watch. Members of the consciousthought group were given 3 min which was set by measuring the sub-jects' sufficient decision time during the pilot test, and asked to eval-uate the movies carefully and write down their choices and reasonson a blank piece of paper. After they had made the choice, we askedthem to rate how satisfied they felt about their choice. Members ofthe unconscious thought group were given minutes to complete anEnglish grammar test consisting of 30 multiple-choice questions, al-though no one was able to answer all the questions in the allottedtime. This is a well-developed procedure to encourage unconsciousthought as the English grammar test is irrelevant to the original taskand therefore distracts the subjects from the decision on movies [16].After the 3 min, they were asked to make their choice immediatelyand also rate how satisfied they felt about their choice. After all the
Table 3Experimental groups defined by quantity and quality of information on the webpage.
Reading time allowed Thought time allowed Information
Experiment 1 12 min 3 min HighHighLowLow
Experiment 2 8 min 3 min HighHighLowLow
subjects made their choices, they were each shown the movie theychose. The movies lasted about 15 min. After watching the movie,they were asked to rate their satisfaction with the movie using a bina-ry variable: 0 means they would not recommend the movie to others,whereas 1 means they would. Finally, the subjects were paid andthanked for their participation. As all of the films were documen-taries, it was highly unlikely that the subjects had seen them before-hand. Our post-experiment questioning of the subjects confirmed thisassumption. Decision satisfaction and post-consumption satisfactionwere both measured using a single-item measure. Literature assertsthat single-item measures are appropriate for the constructs in mar-keting that consist of a concrete singular object and a concrete attri-bute, which is true in our case [5].
4.1.2. Manipulation checkTo ensure that the information processing conditions were reason-
ably assigned, a manipulation check was included in the post-sessionquestionnaire. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted regard-ing whether the subjects would have desired more time to make adecision. The item was to check whether information quantity was dif-ferent enough for them to process. Results show that the high informa-tion quantity groups had a significantly higher desire for more time toprocess the information than the low information quantity groups(mean difference=0.16, pb0.05).
4.1.3. Experiment 2This experiment involves a search product: toothbrushes. In the
experiment, students were invited to pick their favorite toothbrushamong eight toothbrushes after reading the information about thesetoothbrushes on a webpage. Then they were offered the toothbrushthey chose and told to use it after the experiment. After one week,they were re-visited and asked to describe their feeling about theproduct. The procedure of experiment 2 was essentially the same asthat for experiment 1. 20 recruited students participated in its pilottest, followed by 64 for the experiment. Students were generally un-familiar with the toothbrushes' brands since they are foreign brandsthat are seldom sold in the region.
5. Results
5.1. Subject background information
For experiment 1, 160 university students were recruited fromarts and sciences programs, among which 88 were undergraduates.There were 56 males (35%) and 104 females (65%). Their averageage was 21.4 years. There was no significant difference in genderand age across conditions. All the subjects reported little or no famil-iarity with the eight films. For experiment 2, 64 students, including 40undergraduates and 24 graduates were recruited from arts and sci-ences programs as well. Among the subjects, 32 (50%) were femaleand 32 (50%) were male. Again, there was no significant differencein gender and age across conditions. Their average age was 22.5 years.
quantity Number of attribute Information quality Importance score
15 High 136.115 Low 187.210 High 91.010 Low 116.515 High 124.915 Low 177.810 High 75.810 Low 123.4
Decision Satisfaction
Fig. 2. UT effect on decision satisfaction (0: conscious thought; 1: unconscious thought).
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5.2. Hypothesis tests
We use nested models to test the hypotheses mainly for two rea-sons. First, notice that in Table 3, the average scores on high (or low)level of information quality are not the same for different levels of in-formation quantity, implying that the level of “information quality”actually depends on the level of “information quantity.” In otherwords, within the same information quantity level, the high informa-tion quality level has a higher importance ranking score than thelower information quality level does. However, between different in-formation quantity levels, this observation does not necessarily apply.Therefore, a nested model can better fit this characteristic of our ex-periment. Secondly, as it has been shown that there exists an interac-tion effect between information quality and information quantity[32], a nested general linear model can eliminate this effect and ob-serve the direct interaction effect of information quantity and thoughtmode, and interaction effect of information quality and thoughtmode. Furthermore, as the measurement for post-consumptionsatisfaction is binary, we use a logistic regression model with nestedeffects, to measure the effect of information quantity, informationquality and thought mode on post-consumption satisfaction.
Table 4 summarizes the model fit for the movie experiment. Theresults show that for experience products, two significant maineffects, namely information quality and thought mode, and onesignificant two-way interaction effect between the two measurementsexist (pb0.05), which indicates that under unconscious thought, thehigher the information quality, the higher the satisfaction level towardsthe decision. These significant interaction effects imply that H2a andH2b are supported while H1a and H1b are not. Fig. 2 illustrates the sig-nificant effect of thought mode on decision satisfaction in the movieexperiment.
Fig. 3 illustrates the interaction effect between information qualityand thought mode on consumer satisfaction in movie experiment. Wecan see that with the increase of information quality, subjects canmake a better decision under unconscious thought rather than consciousthought. The summery statistics of the data is presented in Appendix 3.
Table 5 gives themodel fit for the toothbrush experiment and no sig-nificant results can be concluded. Comparing the two experiments, theeffect of unconscious thought is only significant in the movie experi-ment. One plausible explanation is that unconscious thought performsbetter in complex situations like choosing an experience product.
We further tested the interaction effect between informationquantity and information quality. Results show that there is no
Table 4Test of the between-subject effects of movie experiment.
Information quantity 0.367 0.545 1.035 0.309Thought mode⁎
Information quality 6.289 0.043⁎⁎ 7.933 0.019⁎⁎
Model fit 40.411 0.001⁎⁎⁎ 21.955 0.015⁎⁎
R squared 0.230 0.139
⁎⁎⁎ pb0.01.⁎⁎ pb0.05.⁎ pb0.1.
significant change by adding the interaction effect in the model butthere exists a significant three-way interaction effect. The effect indi-cates that, with higher information quantity and information quality,unconscious thought can result in higher satisfaction. The situation oflow information quantity and quality holds the opposite result. Thusin general, the model is correct for experience products. Althoughthe total available attribute information of the two products, asshown in Appendix 1, is close, we additionally asked subjects wheth-er they felt that they received enough information in the two experi-ments. Results show that there is no significant difference in theexperiments (pb0.164). Then we conducted another pos-hoc testby introducing a product type dummy variable in the model. Resultsshow that the dummy variable significantly interacts with uncon-scious thought mode, information quantity and quality (all havingpb0.05), suggesting that unconscious thought mode indeed worksdifferently for different product types.
6. Concluding remarks
Overall, the current study yields four contributions. First, by examin-ing the UTT effect on experience products, this study provides construc-tive advice to vendors in terms of marketing strategies and designingproper web pages to guide consumers to examine experience products.Second, the research further completes the models of information pro-cessing in decision making by introducing a new factor, thought mode.Third, findings reveal the working functions of unconscious thoughtunder different information situations. Finally, this study provides acomparison of the UTT effect on different types of products.
6.1. Discussion of results
We reach the following conclusions in the study: First, for experi-ence product purchasing, unconscious thought can help consumersreach higher satisfaction than conscious thought, especially when in-formation quality is high. From a capacity point of view, unconsciousthought has almost infinite processing capacity, which implies that,unlike conscious thought that may suffer from information overload,with information of high quality, unconscious thought can assign rea-sonable weight to every piece of information and thus result in highersatisfaction. In addition, as unconscious thought works bottom-up,this mechanism leads to better integration of all information andhelps consumers form more reasonable expectations, resulting inhigher consumer satisfaction. The strong three-way-interaction effectfound in the movie experiment enhances the conclusion.
Fig. 3. Interaction effect between thought mode and information quality. 0: conscious thought; 1: unconscious thought; dashed line: low information quality; solid line: high informationquality. For the decision satisfaction plot (1–10 scaled), the vertical axis represents themean decision satisfaction level. For the post-consumption satisfaction plot (0–1 scaled), the verticalaxis represents the likelihood of recommending the movie, i.e., the ratio of the probability of recommending the movie to the probability of not recommending.
778 J. Gao et al. / Decision Support Systems 53 (2012) 772–781
According to Table 5, the toothbrush experiment generated nosignificant results. This is not surprising and we believe it is due to thefollowing two reasons. First, althoughwe chose an unfamiliar importedbrand, participants still had experience with toothbrushes, which im-plies that they may not have followed the process of examining all theinformation provided when making a decision. Rather, they may havechosen toothbrushes according to their own experience. Secondly, asa toothbrush is a type of commodity, it is possible that participantswere not highly motivated and thus not seriously engaged in thetasks. Since unconscious thought is a goal-dependent process, lowmotivation may reduce the DWA effect.
6.2. Theoretical contributions
Electronic commerce vendors continue to strive to provide more“right” information to satisfy consumers. However, with the develop-ment of the Internet and search engines, rich and useful informationno longer guarantees a dominant position in the market. Moreover, ashuman beings have a limited capacity for information processing, onlineshoppers are more easily confused when faced with rich information,especially for experience products. Different from existing literature
Table 5Test of the between-subject effects of the toothbrush experiment.
Information quantity 0.23 0.63 4.62 0.10Thought mode⁎
Information quality 0.38 0.69 0.33 0.57Model fit 1.93 0.06⁎ 16.92 0.08⁎
R squared 0.27 0.19
⁎⁎⁎ pb0.01.⁎⁎ pb0.05.⁎ pb0.1.
that has focused on designing proper information or user interfaces tosolve this problem, the current study explores a new mechanism thatunderlines the role of thought mode in processing uncertain informa-tion for experience products. Our results suggest that (1) unconsciousthought can lead to a higher satisfaction for experience products thanconscious thought; (2) information quality, rather than quantity,shows a significant positive effect on satisfaction for experience prod-ucts under unconscious thought; and (3) the DWA effect possibly hasa boundary of its applications on different types of product. Our resultsdemonstrate that DWA is effective on experience products, whereas de-cisions on search products may less likely be affected.
Conscious thought is typically regarded as ideal for decision makingbefore information overload takes effect. After researchers determinedthat information overload can lead to suboptimal decisions, theysearched for methods to eliminate the information overload prob-lem [1,32,51]. While existing research focused on designing proper in-formation or information systems [1,4,32,40], UTT exploits a new wayto solve this dilemma by breaking the bottleneck of human informationprocessing capacity. The current study shows the advantages of uncon-scious thought over conscious thought in complex situations.
Though UTT has been explained by many researchers and manypossible reasons for the DWA effect have been put forward, such asthe capacity principle and weighting principle, investigations on theworking function of this process remain underdeveloped [15]. Thecurrent investigation serves to fill this gap and reveals the functionof unconscious thought by examining the effect of information quan-tity and quality on unconscious thought. Results reveal that an in-crease in information quality can lead to an increase in satisfactionwhen unconscious thought is used in the decision process. As such,people are able to use high-quality information more quickly andmore efficiently than poor-structured, unclear information [23]. Re-sults also suggest that with the increase of information quality, un-conscious thought decision quality should also increase.
The additional toothbrush experiment may evoke researchers' inter-est to explore the contextual effect of product types on unconsciousthought in online shopping decision. Although previous research hasaddressed unconscious thought boundaries and has indicated that infor-mation may affect the performance of conscious and unconsciousthought [47], the current study offers another possibility of such bound-ary by the product types which the decision targets at. The results of themovie experiment and toothbrush experiment demonstrate the differ-ent performance of unconscious thought in experience and search prod-uct contexts. This result indicates that unconscious thought mayperform better in complex situations. This also reminds online vendorsthat not all products are fit for unconscious thought. For products thatinvolve a large amount of uncertain information, vendors may try to
779J. Gao et al. / Decision Support Systems 53 (2012) 772–781
guide consumers into unconscious thought. However, for products thatare simple or quite familiar to consumers, unconscious thought may notwork efficiently.
6.3. Managerial contributions
According to the Czech Statistical Office, more than 50% of onlinesales consist of experience product transactions. The current study notonly helps vendors designweb pages tomarket their goods, but also pro-vides consumerswith a new strategy tomakingwiser decisions on expe-rience product. For online vendors, when selling experience productsonline, vendors want to present all aspects of the products while, at thesame time, taking consumers' information processing capacity into con-sideration, which puts them into a dilemma. To overcome this dilemma,some may suggest highly customized selling methods, such as inter-actingwith consumers and understanding their preferences or providingtest-ride before charging for money. However, these methods are oftentime-consuming and expensive for online vendors. This study offersanother practical and effective method that can be easily applied topurchasing experience products online. Following the cooling-off pe-riods in European consumer laws [6,21,31,48], vendors can design simi-lar cooling-off functions when they detect that consumers are facingdifficulties in making decisions on a product, e.g., in situations whereconsumers browse information of a certain product for quite a whilebut do not make any further decision. The cooling-off functions, suchas inviting consumers to explore fun in online social networks or pre-senting different promotion information, is a mild form of interventionand is irrelevant to consumers' current decision target. Though the infor-mation cannot facilitate consumers' decision making directly, it helpsconsumers release the information overload effect, ease their mind toperform unconscious thought and can increase consumer satisfaction.For example, when purchasing iPhone on yahoo shopping.com, there isa hyperlink which you can click on and go to Facebook or twitter for so-cial interactions. Nomatter what the original purpose of these designs is,this kind of designs delays consumers' decision making for some dura-tion and allows them to re-evaluate their decisions without haste in an
Movie information Importance scores Ranking
Editor 8.0 20Leading actors 6.8 23Release date 14.5 4Release area 16.2 1Filming location 16.0 2Language 8.7 17Douban rating* 9.5 16IMDB rating 8.5 18Details of Douban rating 14.7 3Details of IMDB rating 13.4 8Sub-category rating 10.8 13Color 14.2 7Sound mix 10.8 13Runtime 12.7 10Plot key words 8.0 21Parent guide 12.0 11Number of customer review 11.5 12Production co. 14.3 6Tag lines 7.7 22Rewards 6.2 24Story lines 3.1 25Introduction to the editor 9.6 15Comments 8.5 19Cast list 13.2 9Fun fact 14.5 4
Appendix 1. Perceived importance of information measured in pilot te
*Douban is a review-sharing and recommendation website in China. Its web traffic is ranke
unconscious thought mode. Literature on pop-up advertisements alsodemonstrates that such distraction could trigger unconscious thought[57].
For consumers, a short break, such as washing their hands or check-ing email, during the online decision making process can help con-sumers have a fresh look at all options, as [35] suggests, and formrational expectations on both the products they choose and the onesthey reject, therefore resulting in fewer regrets after the use of a prod-uct. In current digital age, IT-based innovation is fundamentally chang-ing consumers' information environment. Social media, for example,where users communicate with each other about shopping experiencesacross various platforms, have experienced explosive informationgrowth in recent years, while consumers' information processing abil-ity is still limited. The findings of the interaction between informationattributes and thought modes can shed lights on how to develop prac-tical approaches to help consumers' decision making processes.
6.4. Limitation and future research
In our study, we examine the interaction effect between informa-tion quantity, information quality and thought mode. Therefore,more information attributes, such as information accuracy and infor-mation timeliness can be considered to further explore the workingfunctions of UTT. Besides, using toothbrush in the experiment maylimit conclusions on the impact of product type on the influence ofunconscious thought due to its simplicity in decision. More typicalsearch products as suggested by [42] should be considered for furtherexploration on the moderating effect of product types on thoughtmodes in online shopping.
Acknowledgment
The authors acknowledge the useful and constructive commentsof the guest editors and four anonymous reviewers. This research issupported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (ProjectNos. 70828003, 70801017 and 70832001)and Shanghai Pujiang Program.
Toothbrush information Importance score Ranking
Model type 3.6 22Brand name 8.1 5Brand introduction 6.9 8Specification 5.4 18Place of production 4.6 20Color 5.6 16Price 8.7 2Size 6.4 9Length of brush 5.8 14Length of handle 5.5 17Diameter of brush 6.4 9Height of brush 5.9 12Breadth of brush 5.8 14Shape of brush 7.2 7Suggestion population 8.1 4Recommend functionality 8.7 2Company introduction 5.9 12Time limit of usage 6.1 11Heat-resistant level 4.8 19Transaction history 8.0 6Recent comments by consumers 8.8 1Recommend usage of the product 4.6 20
st of two experiments
d 28 in China and ranked 192 globally by Alexa.com.
780 J. Gao et al. / Decision Support Systems 53 (2012) 772–781
Appendix 2. Experimental web pages
Front Page Sample Webpage of Films (Low info.
quantity & high info. quality)
Appendix 3. Summery statistics of experiment 1 (sample size: 160)
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JiC
e Gao is currently a postgraduate student in the Graduate School of Art and Science,olumbia University. Her current interests include online shopping and
decision-making strategies. Her work has appeared in the proceedings of PACIS.
Cheng Zhang is an associate professor at School of Management Fudan University. Hiscurrent research interests include information sharing strategies, information technol-ogy diffusion and electronic markets. His works have been published by journals suchas Decision Support Systems, Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, Elec-tronic Markets, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, IEEE Transactions onProfessional Communication, International Journal of Electronic Commerce, Interna-tional Journal of Production Economics, International Journal of Production Research,Journal of International Marketing, Journal of the American Society for Information Sci-ence and Technology, Journal of Global Information Management, Omega, and Simula-tion Modeling Practice and Theory.
Ke Wang is an assistant professor at School of Management, Fudan University. His cur-rent research interests include design and analysis of discrete choice experiments, sta-tistical analysis of spatial and network data. His works have been published by journalssuch as Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference, Statistics and Probability Letters,and Journal of Global Information Management.
Sulin Ba is a professor of Information Systems at the School of Business at the Universityof Connecticut. Her current research interests include the effective provision of e-service,online price dispersion, digital health communities, and pricing of virtual goods in virtualworlds. She has published in Management Science, Information Systems Research, MISQuarterly, Journal of Management Information Systems, Production and OperationsMan-agement, Decision Support Systems, and other academic journals. She is a recipient of theYear 2000 MIS Quarterly Best Paper Award, UConn School of Business Teaching Innova-tion Award (2007), Undergraduate Teaching Award (2008), and Best Paper Award(2009). She is a senior editor for Production and Operations Management and associateeditor for MIS Quarterly. She currently also serves on the editorial board of Decision Sup-port Systems.
