Choice Architecture and Plausible Paths

In this talk I will focus on one mechanism that explains how some choice architecture has an effect:  The fact that choosers select strategies that make choice, in the short term, easier.  After laying out a framework, I will discuss two case studies with very different implications for consumer welfare.   The first is the role of choice architecture in app adoption, and the second, the use of dark defaults to increase contributions to a political candidate’s campaign.

How can firms encourage consumers to adopt smartphone apps? The authors show that several inexpensive choice architecture techniques can make users more likely to enable important app features and complete app onboarding. Across six pre-registered experiments (n=5,968) and a field experiment (n=594,997), choice architecture interventions manipulating choice sequence, color, and wording of app adoption decisions dramatically increased app adoption. Across experiments, integrating multiple feature decisions into a single choice increased adoption. This integration effect emerges because it decreases decision noise and reduces the prominence of individual features, consistent with support theory. Changing colors to match habitual patterns commonly found in current digital interfaces appears to increase adoption by accelerating consumers’ decisions. Finally, wording options as if enabling the app was the default response (even without changing the actual default) also increases adoption. These defaultless defaults may be particularly relevant in heavily regulated consumer domains,  such as finance or healthcare. The effects generalized across different types of apps and were robust across subsamples varying in demographics, attitudes towards the apps, and political affiliation. These results suggest simple tools that marketing managers and app developers can use to increase app adoption.