On the Relationship between Interactive Decision Aids and Decision Strategies: A Theoretical Analysis

The amount of Internet sales has been growing at a high and constant rate over the last years. Many customers use Internet shops on a regular basis. Internet shops ensure a high transparency on product properties (including prices) and customers are able to easily compare a large number of products (options) and choose the one that best fits their expectations. During the decision process, customers apply decision strategies which describe the way on how they choose among different options. In the literature, a large variety of decision strategies is discussed. In Internet shops, customers are usually confronted with comparison matrixes where the properties of different products are visualized and compared in a table. To help the customers to choose the right product from such a matrix, Internet shops often use interactive decision aids like sorting of products, dropping products or product properties, or performing pairwise comparisons between products. Such decision aids should reduce the complexity of the decision task and help the customers to find the product that best fulfils their expectations.[...]