Adding options is what economists call a “Pareto improvement,” making some people better off while making nobody worse off.īecause of the “obvious” truth of the proposition that more choice makes us better off, it was big news when Sheena Iyengar published a series of studies more than a decade ago showing the opposite. People who don’t care about added options can ignore them, and people who do care may be able to find the perfect thing. We’re much obliged.īarry Schwartz: It seems a simple matter of logic that if people have more options in a choice domain (cereals in the grocery, shirts in the department store, mutual funds in the financial market, health insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act), they’re better off. (The link is to a Financial Times article that sits behind a pay-to-read firewall.) But, when I asked him, Barry Schwartz was gracious enough to respond to the pro-choice literature that’s been coming out recently, and in the process, to summarize it. Is more choice a good thing? Apparently the famous jam experiment doesn't replicate: by Justin Wolfers January 23, 2014
Today, then, the news story would not be that the proliferation of consumer choice is paralyzing us, as Schwartz argued, but that he’s wrong.Īnd indeed, that’s been the counterattack lately, which came to my attention the other day when economist Justin Wolfers tweeted this: Paul Solman: In 2003, our NewsHour economics crew traipsed to the western outskirts of Philadelphia to rendezvous with Swarthmore psychology professor Barry Schwartz and hear him make the case, at the something-for-everyone King of Prussia Mall, for the thesis around which he’d just written a book, “The Paradox of Choice.”Ī decade, a TED talk and a Freakonomics seal of approval later, the choice thesis has become something of a commonplace.
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