Consumers' allocation of cognitive resources in web-based search: an exploratory study

In this paper, we discuss factors that influence how consumers allocate their search effort between searching within information sources (e.g., websites) and searching for relevant sources of such information (e.g., by employing general search engines). We propose that the nature of the search task as well as characteristics of the individual, influence the amount of time spent conducting each component of the search task and may account for several findings indicating that, despite the seemingly low cost of online information search, consumers tend to search relatively few sources of information prior to purchase.