All the cues we cannot see: How reward-driven distractors render consumers insensitive to assortment complexity

Consumers face assortments in the retail environment that are more and more complex. This research extends the current literature on location-based choice behavior by demonstrating how varying assortment complexity impacts consumer choice behavior while shopping and how the presence or absence of reward-driven distractors (cues that promise a reward yet are unrelated to the choice task) modulate that choice process. We find that consumers tend to choose products closer to the center of an assortment when facing non-complex assortments. At the same time, they shift their choice towards the edge when selecting products from complex assortments. However, we only observe these effects in the absence of reward-driven distractors. When present, assortment complexity fails to steer consumers into diverging product locations. We discuss how our findings might inform retail practice.