Best Strategies for Mitigating Choice Overload

Objectives of the study As the growth in product variety and assortment continues to soar, consumers nowadays are more susceptible to choice overload. In order to attract and retain customers, retailers must take actions to mitigate the choice overload problem in their product assortments. Hence, this study aims to find out best strategies that enterprises can employ to mitigate choice overload. Academic background and methodology Prior research has mainly concentrated on proving the existence of choice overload problem as well as the effects of assortment size reduction on mitigating the problem. However, little research has been done on examining additional mitigation strategies for choice overload. Therefore, this study aims to identify further approaches that enterprises can adopt to mitigate choice overload problem by examining different assortment strategies as well as the consumer groups in experienced choice overload level. The assortment strategies examined in the study are Assortment Size Reduction, Categorization, Provision of a Default Option and Unconscious Information Processing. As for consumer groups, different groups classified by Gender, Age, Education and Continent were compared. The thesis employed a behavioral experiment to examine participants’ degree of experienced choice overload when making their decisions in different assortment conditions. Participants were assigned to 9 different assortment scenarios corresponding to different combinations of mitigation approaches. After making their decision in the assortment, they were asked to evaluate their choice overload based on a set of statements. The experiment results revealed the effectiveness of different mitigation approaches and the differences among consumer groups in experienced choice overload. Findings and conclusion First, the experiment confirmed the existence of choice overload effect. Second, the experiment suggested the effectiveness of assortment strategies. Third, we uncovered that most effective mitigation strategies are Reduction of Assortment Size and Unconscious Information Processing. Fourth, the mitigation strategies were discovered to be more effective when being in combination with each other instead of being stand-alone. Finally, regarding the differences among consumer groups in experienced choice overload, those who demonstrated low levels of choice overload are men, elders and highly educated people. These results suggest various actions that enterprises should consider to mitigate choice overload in their product assortments

Artificial Immune Systems for Combinatorial Optimisation: A Theoretical Investigation

We focus on the clonal selection inspired computational models of the immune system developed for general-purpose optimisation. Our aim is to highlight when these artificial immune systems (AIS) are more efficient than evolutionary algorithms (EAs). Compared to traditional EAs, AIS use considerably higher mutation rates (hypermutations) for variation, give higher selection probabilities to more recent solutions and lower selection probabilities to older ones (ageing). We consider the standard Opt-IA that includes both of the AIS distinguishing features and argue why it is of greater applicability than other popular AIS. Our first result is the proof that the stop at first constructive mutation version of its hypermutation operator is essential. Without it, the hypermutations cannot optimise any function with an arbitrary polynomial number of optima. Afterwards we show that the hypermutations are exponentially faster than the standard bit mutation operator used in traditional EAs at escaping from local optima of standard benchmark function classes and of the NP-hard Partition problem. If the basin of attraction of the local optima is not too large, then ageing allows even greater speed-ups. For the Cliff benchmark function this can make the difference between exponential and quasi-linear expected time. If the basin of attraction is too large, then ageing can implicitly detect the local optimum and escape it by automatically restarting the search process. The described power of hypermutations and ageing allows us to prove that they guarantee (1+epsilon) approximations for Partition in expected polynomial time for any constant epsilon. These features come at the expense of the hypermutations being a linear factor slower than EAs for standard unimodal benchmark functions and of eliminating the power of ageing at escaping local optima in the complete Opt-IA. We show that hypermutating with inversely proportional rates mitigates such drawbacks at the expense of losing the explorative advantages of the standard operator. We conclude the thesis by designing fast hypermutation operators that are provably a linear factor faster than the traditional ones for the unimodal benchmark functions and Partition, while maintaining explorative power and working in harmony together with ageing

Information Technologies for Cognitive Decline

Information technology (IT) is used to establish a diagnosis and provide treatment for people with cognitive decline. The condition affects many before it becomes clear that more permanent changes, like dementia, could be noticed. Those who search for information are exposed to lots of information and different technologies which they need to make sense of and eventually use to help themselves. In this research literature and information available on the Internet were systematically analyzed to present methods used for diagnosis and treatment. Methods used for diagnosis are self-testing, sensors, Virtual Reality (VR), and brain imaging. Methods used for treatment are games, websites with information and media, Virtual Reality (VR), sensors, and robots. The resulting concept of knowledge was the basis of an artifact whose main goal was to present the facts to the broad public. This implied that a user-friendly artifact was developed through three iterations using the Design Science framework. A total of nine users and IT usability experts have evaluated the artifact returning the SUS score of 85,83 for users and 87,5 for IT usability experts. Nielsen´s heuristics were assessed by IT usability experts only, returning an average score of 4,28. The general response was positive regarding both the content and the attempt to present methods used in cognitive decline. It reminds to be seen how to bring this knowledge to those who are most affected by the decline.Masteroppgave i informasjonsvitenskapINFO390MASV-INF

Boost: Improving Mindfulness, Thinking, and Diversity

Many important decisions can be difficult; require focused, cognitive attention; produce delayed, noisy feedback; benefit from careful and clear thinking; and quite often trigger anxiety, stress, and other strong, negative emotions. Much empirical, experimental, and field research finds that we often make decisions leading to outcomes we judge as suboptimal. These studies have contributed to the popularity of the idea of nudging people to achieve better outcomes by changing how choices and information are framed and presented (also known as choice architecture and information architecture). Although choice architecture and information architecture can nudge people into better outcomes, choice architecture and information architecture also assume implicitly or explicitly that people’s decision-making competencies are immutable or too costly to improve and, therefore, choice architecture and information architecture fail to improve people’s decision-making competencies. This Article advocates boosts to improve mindfulness, thinking, and diversity. Boosts differ from nudges in that boosts aim to improve decision-making competencies, instead of just decisionmaking outcomes. Mindfulness involves paying attention to life in an intentional way as it unfolds moment to moment. Mindfulness improves decision-making through many pathways, including by reducing stress and negative emotions. Recent economic research demonstrates that many cognitive biases exemplify lack of mindfulness about particular aspects of life. Thinking boosts include thinking technologies and diversity. Thinking technologies involve computer or digital technologies to assist people in their thinking. Examples of novel, fun thinking technologies include a financial entertainment computer video game where a player is a vampire managing a blood bar and planning for retirement, and video adventure games designed to teach players to recognize and mitigate their cognitive biases. Diversity creates bonuses for organizations by improving decision-making, creativity, innovation, prediction, problem-solving, and productivity

Boost: Improving Mindfulness, Thinking, and Diversity

Many important decisions can be difficult; require focused, cognitive attention; produce delayed, noisy feedback; benefit from careful and clear thinking; and quite often trigger anxiety, stress, and other strong, negative emotions. Much empirical, experimental, and field research finds that we often make decisions leading to outcomes we judge as suboptimal. These studies have contributed to the popularity of the idea of nudging people to achieve better outcomes by changing how choices and information are framed and presented (also known as choice architecture and information architecture). Although choice architecture and information architecture can nudge people into better outcomes, choice architecture and information architecture also assume implicitly or explicitly that people’s decision-making competencies are immutable or too costly to improve and, therefore, choice architecture and information architecture fail to improve people’s decision-making competencies. This Article advocates boosts to improve mindfulness, thinking, and diversity. Boosts differ from nudges in that boosts aim to improve decision-making competencies, instead of just decisionmaking outcomes. Mindfulness involves paying attention to life in an intentional way as it unfolds moment to moment. Mindfulness improves decision-making through many pathways, including by reducing stress and negative emotions. Recent economic research demonstrates that many cognitive biases exemplify lack of mindfulness about particular aspects of life. Thinking boosts include thinking technologies and diversity. Thinking technologies involve computer or digital technologies to assist people in their thinking. Examples of novel, fun thinking technologies include a financial entertainment computer video game where a player is a vampire managing a blood bar and planning for retirement, and video adventure games designed to teach players to recognize and mitigate their cognitive biases. Diversity creates bonuses for organizations by improving decision-making, creativity, innovation, prediction, problem-solving, and productivity

Probabilistic Tools for the Analysis of Randomized Optimization Heuristics

This chapter collects several probabilistic tools that proved to be useful in the analysis of randomized search heuristics. This includes classic material like Markov, Chebyshev and Chernoff inequalities, but also lesser known topics like stochastic domination and coupling or Chernoff bounds for geometrically distributed random variables and for negatively correlated random variables. Most of the results presented here have appeared previously, some, however, only in recent conference publications. While the focus is on collecting tools for the analysis of randomized search heuristics, many of these may be useful as well in the analysis of classic randomized algorithms or discrete random structures.Comment: 91 page