| Author: | Guo, Rui |
| Title: | Can amount of information and information presentation reduce choice overload? An empirical study of online hotel booking |
| Advisors: | Li Neil (SHTM) |
| Degree: | M.Sc. |
| Year: | 2021 |
| Subject: | Consumer behavior Tourists -- Psychology Hospitality industry Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations |
| Department: | School of Hotel and Tourism Management |
| Pages: | iv, 110 pages : color illustrations |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | The effects of choice size on consumer’s psychology and behavior of decision-making have been investigated by many prior researchers. Traditionally, providing more choices have been considered as beneficial to decision makers. However, a concept called choice overload, suggesting that too many choices can sometimes lead to negative consequences of people’s decision-making, has been proposed and attracted attentions of many scholars in the past few decades. The contradictory findings may be attributed to some preconditions of the occurrence of choice overload. Most of the early studies on choice overload were conducted in the context of retail industry, which arouse some researchers’ interests to identify this phenomenon in hotel and tourism industries with different product characteristics and consumer behavior. Inspired by a few studies regarding the topic of choice overload in the hospitality context and the current situation of the rapid development of online travel booking, this study aims to explore the existence, underlying reasons, and possible moderators of choice overload effect in the online hotel booking context. The conceptual framework, including choice size, as the independent variable, and perceived choice overload, as the dependent variable, together with the two mediators and two moderators, have been developed based on literature of choice overload, traveler’s decision-making, and decision-making in online shopping environment. Choice overload effect is associated with choice complexity, which can be impacted by amount of information provided. In addition, information presentation format has been considered as one of the task factors affecting choice overload. Both amount and presentation of information are proposed as possible moderators of choice overload effect in this study. By using an imaginary scenario method, two experiments have been conducted to test two pairs of mediators and moderators respectively. The first experiment orthogonally manipulates the number of choices and the amount of information (2choice sizes x 2amount of information); the second manipulates the number of choices and the presentation of information which is altered by using colors on text (2choice sizes x 2presentation of information). In both studies, respondents were randomly assigned to one of four different scenarios. The results of this study reveal that (1) Controlling other factors, having more choices increase people’s perceived choice overload; (2) By mitigating people’s perceived uncertainty during choice-making, the choice overload effect is attenuated when more information of each choice is provided; (3) By alleviating people’s perceived task difficulty during choice-making, the choice overload effect is reduced when text information is presented by using proper hues with important information highlighted. Theoretically, this study adds to the choice overload and traveler’s decision-making literature by providing empirical evidence of choice overload effect in the online hotel booking context. In response to the call for more research focusing on the underlying reasons and potential moderators of choice overload in hospitality and tourism contexts, this study has identified perceived uncertainty and choice task difficulty as two mediators, and amount of information and information presentation as two moderators of choice overload effect in online hotel booking context. The practical contributions of this study benefit consumers, OTAs and hotel groups. The findings could enable OTAs and hotel groups gain better understandings regarding negative consequences of providing too-many choices and demonstrate the importance of amount of information and information presentation on consumers’ decision-making. Inspired by the study results, some solutions to minimize the choice overload effect are proposed accordingly. The main body of this thesis provides further discussions and implications. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | restricted access |
Files in This Item:
| File | Description | Size | Format | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6910.pdf | For All Users (off-campus access for PolyU Staff & Students only) | 3.85 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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