Improving Decision Quality Through Preference Relaxation

In online shopping scenarios, it can be difficult for consumers to process the vast amounts of information available and to make satisfactory buying decisions. Interactive decision aids are a potential solution to this problem. However, decision aids that filter a very large set of alternatives based on initial preferences may eliminate potentially valuable alternatives early in the decision process and possibly negatively impact decision quality. To address this issue we introduce a new kind of decision aid that enables consumers to consider highquality alternatives they initially eliminated. We develop a model of such a decision aid and evaluate it on a set of 2650 car advertisements gathered from popular used car advertiser website. We discuss the potential impact of our decision aid on decision quality and consideration sets parameters, and give an overview of implications of our study for practitioners and researchers.