The Review of Economics and Statistics has accepted for publication Prof. Besedes's paper "Reducing Choice Overload without Reducing Choices." The paper is co-authored with Cary Deck (University of Arkansas), Sudipta Sarangi (Louisiana State University and NSF), and Mikhael Shor (University of Connecticut).

The paper examines decision making and whether it is possible to improve decisions people make without reducing available alternatives. It is possible to do so by restructuring a group of a large number of alternatives into several smaller groups in a particular way. When they are structured as a tournament (four groups of alternatives, choose one from each group, then compare the four chosen ones) people will make significantly better decisions. When they are structured in a sequential manner (start with a small number, choose one, add more, repeat until all alternatives have been evaluated) the outcome is not at all different from comparing all alternatives at once. This happens because people fall prey to a status quo bias and are more likely to stick with the option they chose in the first smaller set of alternatives. The paper also shows that people are unable to recognize that tournament allows them to make better choices as they prefer that way of arriving to a decision the least, even though it gets them the best outcome.

The paper can be found here: