The Effect of Information Organization and Decision Process on Decision Speed and Accuracy in a Purchase Task Context

Little research have explored purchase as a task. What is the decision process of the employee when asked by the boss to purchase a printer for the office? In a purchase task scenario, the onus is on the retailer to provide organized information for consumers. We offer a human factor’s perspective. Information organization influences decision time and decision accuracy. This relationship is moderated by the decision process of the shopper. We predict that when faced with information organized into paragraphs, consumers who use type 1 (heuristics) decision processes would make less accurate decisions than those who use type 2 (rational) processes. A similar relationship exists for information organized into matrices, but we predict the difference in accuracy would be smaller. The results would have implications that suggest retailers should better organize their information to facilitate purchase decisions.