The effect of default options on consumer decisions in the product configuration process

Product configurators have been accepted as an important enabling toolkit to bridge customer needs and company offerings. In the configuration process, customers choose from a set of predefined attributes and their options. The combination of choices forms the desired product configuration. It is observed that some online configurators provide default options for each attribute. Although previous studies show that the default option significantly affects customers' choices during the product configuration process, it is not clear how other factors mediate this impact. In this paper, we investigate how product types, number of choices, customers' degree of expertise, the importance of the attributes and the configuring sequence affect consumers' decisions in the configuration process when default options are presented. Based on a series of empirical experiments, we find that customers' degree of expertise, the rating of the attribute importance, and the number of attribute choices have a significant effect on customers' choices for utilitarian products. For hedonic products, the importance of the attributes and the configuring sequence are significant factors. Copyright © 2018 CEUR-WS. All rights reserved.