PAST RESEARCH ON INFORMATION LOAD EFFECTS ON CONSUMERS The attempt to empirically investigate the effect of information load on consumers

was pioneered by Jacoby and his associates (Jacoby, Speller, and Berning 1974; Jacoby, Speller, and Kohn 1974). In their experiments, they systematically varied the amount of product information provided in terms of the number of brands in the choice set and the number of attributes per brand and examined the effects of information provision on decision-making performance. Based on their investigations, these authors concluded that consumers "actually make poorer purchase decisions with more information" (Jacoby, Speller, and Kohn 1974, p. 63). However, critics raised several conceptual and methodological issues (Russo 1974; Summers 1974; Wilkie 1974). The major objections were: * Total information should not be defined in terms of number of brands times number of attributes per brand. * When comparing the effects of the number of alternatives on choice accuracy, one should account for the effect of chance factors. * The choice-accuracy measures used in the Jacoby studies may not be appropriate. * The effects of stimulus variables, such as the relative attractiveness of choice alternatives and the salience.of the information provided, should also be considered. Later, in reviewing this controversy, Jacoby acknowledged

that their investigations "did not generate unambiguous results" (Jacoby 1977, p. 571). Scammon (1977) also investigated the information-load paradigm. She varied the number of attributes and the format in which information was provided to the consumers at two levels each. However, her study has limited usefulness, as the number of brands was kept constant and the number of attributes was not varied over a sufficient number of levels (Wilkie 1974). Moreover, a reanalysis of the data obtained in these studies, by employing a more powerful analytical procedure, has indicated that, contrary to claims made by these authors, information overload did not occur in their experiments (Malhotra 1979; Malhotra, Jain, and Lagakos, forthcoming). Thus, as Bettman (1979a, p. 206) notes, "whether information overload occurs and hinders consumer choices is still an open issue." Hence, an empirical examination of the effects of information load on decision-making performance was undertaken. The design, data collection, analysis and results of the investigation are described in the following. STUDY DESIGN In designing this study, an effort was made to overcome the major conceptual and methodological limitations of previous investigations. In previous research the number of alternatives and the number of brands used to examine information load effects were restricted to 16 or less. Wilkie (1974) has emphasized the need to include a wider range

of alternatives and attributes to demonstrate the information-overload premise. Hence, a 5 (number of alternatives) x 5 (number of attributes), two-factor, between-subjects design was employed to avoid the demand artifacts and contaminations due to carry-over effects and learning that arise in within-subjects design (Sawyer 1975). It is for this reason that all the previous investigations of informationload effects on consumers have employed between-subjects designs (Jacoby, Speller, and Berning 1974; Jacoby, Speller, and Kohn 1974; Scammon 1977). The more recent psychological studies that have examined overload effects (Milord and Perry 1977) have also adopted between-subjects designs. The number of alternatives in the choice set was varied from five to 25 in increments of five. The number of attributes on which information was provided was also varied from five to 25 in increments of five. Manipulation checks on a pretest sample indicated that consumers perceived these levels of the number of alternati