Consumer Choice and Information: New Experimental Evidence

This paper reports on a series of experiments designed to explore the so-called "information overload" hypothesis. We generally find that our subjects do quite well at screening out irrelevant information. Further, we find that a key element determining the quality of choices made by our subjects is the number of "salient" attributes, not just the number of attributes for which information is provided. Weak evidence is found which suggests a form of overload might occur when the number of salient dimensions is high and information is given on all of them. Finally, we discuss the implications of these results on the disclosure controversy.