Digital Nudging towards Acceptance of Defaults in Product Configuration

Online product configurators allow customers to create highly customized products. However, their design strongly affects users’ decision-making. This paper explores the relationship between the order of product attribute decisions and customers’ choice of default options. Using a fully randomized experiment with 596 participants, we found that defaults are selected more often when the configuration process starts with a high number of selection options, which was hypothesized to deplete cognitive resources. An order with a decreasing number of options also led to lower perceived choice difficulty and higher choice satisfaction. Based on a recency effect, the last easy decisions in the configuration seem to most strongly influence the overall impression and also reduced skepticism towards defaults. Thus, customers seemed unaware of how cognitive depletion could “nudge” them towards choosing defaults. This study contributes to digital nudging research and provides guidance to practitioners for implementing less effortful product configuration decisions “by design.”