While offering choice can meet diverse consumer tastes, it can also decrease consumers’ satisfaction or motivation to choose altogether. It is unclear under which circumstances offering choice would be detrimental or beneficial for consumers. In two experiments, we find that offering utilitarian choices decreased, but offering hedonic ones increased, choice satisfaction. Offering utilitarian choices increased difficulty and depleted consumers, while offering hedonic choices increased autonomy and vitalized them. We thus suggest that the different types of choice that consumers make likely act as a moderator for the choice overload phenomenon
