Consumer-based decision aid that explains which to buy: Decision confirmation or overconfidence bias?

Providing explanation to justify product recommendations is critical in the online purchase decision process. Bulk of the extant literature has focused on the provision of decision aids facilitating screening of product alternatives and presenting of filtered alternatives. In comparison, few studies are conducted to examine decision aids that support the assessment and evaluation of the presented product alternatives prior to actual purchase, i.e.. explanation-featured decision aid. This article conceptualizes three implementations of explanation aid differed by the forms of explanation elaboration. Experimental results indicate that a more elaborated explanation aid could heighten a consumer's decision confidence leading to lesser cognitive effort expended and inferior product choice made. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.