An exploratory study of limited information acquisition: Do brand names make product evaluations easy?

Consumers are faced with an enormous amount of information when making product evaluations. Faced with this difficulty, they often try to simplify the evaluation process by limiting their information acquisition. The purpose of this study is to identify two types of such limited information acquisition strategies (IAS), brand-based and attribute-based, and to investigate their characteristics in the product evaluation process. A computer-based laboratory experiment was conducted to gather empirical evidence. The results identified differences in time spent on processing each piece of information, the amount of perceived effort, and the degree of perceived task complexity depending upon which limited IAS consumers utilized. Specifically, the utilization of attribute-based limited IAS simplifies consumers' information processing, a finding that is consistent with the previous literature. However, that of brand-based limited IAS does not necessarily make the task easy; in fact, it may make it difficult. Implications, limitations and future research directions are discussed.