Searching for the highest number

Abstract

When viewing a collection of products how does a consumer decide which one to buy? To do this task, the consumer not only needs to evaluate the desirability of the products, taking into account factors such as quality and price, but also needs to search through the products to find the most desirable one. We studied the search process using an abstraction of a common consumer choice task. In our task, observers searched an array of numbers for the highest. Crucially, the observers did not know in advance what this number would be, which made it difficult to know when the search should be terminated. In this way, our search task mimicked a problem often faced by consumers in a supermarket set..