잼 24종을 진열하면 손님은 더 적게 산다

The ideal of consumer freedom rests on a simple promise: the more options a market offers, the better off the chooser will be. From this premise flows the everyday belief that wider product lines reliably serve us well. In a field experiment published in the 2000 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper rotated a Wilkin & Sons jam tasting display at an upscale California grocery store between twenty-four varieties and six. The larger spread did pull more attention, drawing about 60 percent of passing shoppers to stop, against 40 percent at the smaller one. Yet at the register the pattern reversed: nearly 30 percent of those who tasted the six-jar display walked away with a jar, while a mere 3 percent did so after sampling from the twenty-four — almost a tenfold gap. Beyond a threshold, extra options inflate the costs of comparing, justifying, and bracing against later regret, until the easiest move becomes no move at all. For marketers and policy makers, offering more does not reliably translate into more sales — or any decision at all.