The Influence of Commodity Presentation Mode on Online Shopping Decision Preference Induced by the Serial Position Effect

Abstract

The information cluster that supports the final decision in a decision task is usually presented as a series of information. According to the serial position effect, the decision result is easily affected by the presentation order of the information. In this study, we seek to investigate how the presentation mode of commodities and the informativeness on a shopping website will influence online shopping decisions. To this end, we constructed two experiments via a virtual online shopping environment. The first experiment suggests that the serial position effect can induce human computer interaction decision-making bias, and user decision-making results in separate evaluation mode are more prone to the recency effect, whereas user decision-making results in joint evaluation mode are more prone to the primacy effect. The second experiment confirms the influence of explicit and implicit details of information on the decision bias of the human computer interaction caused by the serial position effect. The results of the research will be better applied to the design and development of shopping websites or further applied to the interactive design of complex information systems to alleviate user decision-making biases and induce users to make more rational decisions.

Keywords

• serial position effect
• information presentation
• evaluation mode
• decision-making biases
• consumer decision-making
• decision support systems