Assortment Size And Option Attractiveness In Consumer Choice Among Retailers

An important decision that retailers make involves selecting the number of items comprising their assortments. A key issue in making these decisions concerns the role that assortment size plays in determining consumers' choice of a retailer. Authors of the paper address this issue by investigating how consumer choice among retailers offering various sized assortments is influenced by the attractiveness of the options comprising these assortments. They show that consumer preference for retailers offering larger assortments tends to decrease as the attractiveness of the options in their assortments increases, and can even lead to a reversal of preferences in favor of retailers offering smaller assortments.