Freedom of choice vs. freedom from choice
24th October 2006
I’ve mentioned the Democracy Player favorably on a number of times in this blog.
Yet I must admit I have 2 problems: 1) living in Thailand with substandard ADSL connections, I have yet to succeed in downloading one single video; 2) I do not find what I’m looking for.
Channels are supposed to offer consumers freedom from choice, and that is a nice option to have, but not when it is at the expense of freedom of choice. In other words, when the channel approach makes it difficult to find an individual program.
Opinions on this are welcome.
October 24th, 2006 at 10:34 pm
Just a brainwave as I am writing my preliminary conclusions on my thesis which addresses a similar problem. My research tries to answer the question “How to support customization and personalization for pure digital products in the Internet economy to dramatically decrease complexity and search costs for consumers, so variety can be maximized?”
Preliminary answers to this question are to present choice sets by attribute rather than by alternative (Huffman and Kahn, 1998), to make use of personal recommendations (Stegmann et al., 2006), to increase consumer expertise (Dellaert and Stremersch, 2004; Piller et al., 2005; Huffman and Kahn, 1998), and to make use of collaborative co-design (Piller et al., 2005).
Of course, the Internet connection should not be a limitation. Again, these are preliminary conclusions, final conclusions will not take long. When done, my thesis can be downloaded from bottomup.wordpress.com/
Other recommended readings: ‘The tyranny of choice’, by Barry Schwartz.