Status quo bias in configuration systems

Product configuration systems are an important instrument to implement mass customization, a production paradigm that supports the manufacturing of highly-variant products under pricing conditions similar to mass production. A side-effect of the high diversity of products offered by a configurator is that the complexity of the alternatives may outstrip a user's capability to explore them and make a buying decision. A personalization of such systems through the calculation of feature recommendations (defaults) can support customers (users) in the specification of their requirements and thus can lead to a higher customer satisfaction. A major risk of defaults is that they can cause a status quo bias and therefore make users choose options that are, for example, not really needed to fulfill their requirements. In this paper we present the results of an empirical study that aimed to explore whether there exist status quo effects in product configuration scenarios.

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