A common assumption in economics is that people are not made worse off by having more choices. Adding a choice gives people another option which they can choose if they like better than the existing options, or reject if they don’t. Thus another option should be (at least weakly) beneficial.

However, Physorg reports on a recent series of experiments which showed that having to make complicated choices can worsen people’s performance in subsequent tasks. For example, in experiments, people who had to make choices among many options performed worse, on average, on subsequent math tests compared to people who made simpler choices prior to the math tests.

If true, it seems that people’s concentration is also a scarce resource. Making a complicated choice uses some of this up, so less is available for subsequent thinking. Obviously at some point the resource is replenished, by resting or sleeping I guess. There are some interesting implications for businesses in terms of product design, e.g. having a smaller product range with less variety may be preferable to broad range with lots of choices.

(HT: Signal vs Noise)