E-commerce consumers often face complex product choices and have to make decisions at various times of the day. Extant research has primarily focused on providing decision aids and eliminating “distracting” features to help consumers' conscious thought when making complex decisions. Our research adopts a novel perspective that consumers' unconscious thought may have some advantages and be exploited to help consumers make complex purchase decisions, especially when one's circadian preference (optimal time of day for decision-making, e.g., morning vs. evening) is not met. Drawing on the Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT), we developed two hypotheses regarding the effects of consumers' unconscious thought and its interaction with consumer circadian preference on decision quality. A controlled experiment was conducted to test our hypotheses. The findings show that unconscious thought outperforms conscious thought for making complex product choices in general and such effects are amplified when there is an asynchrony between one's circadian preference and the time of decision. The new circadian synchrony perspective enriches our understanding of the effects of unconscious thought on decision-making, helps explain the somewhat mixed findings in prior work on UTT, and thus contributes back to the UTT literature. The findings have implications about how unconscious thought can be leveraged to facilitate online shopping, and underscores the importance of considering consumer's circadian preference and time of decision.

电子商务消费者通常面临复杂的产品选择，并且必须在一天的不同时间做出决定。现有的研究主要集中在提供决策辅助和消除“分散注意力”的功能上，以帮助消费者在做出复杂决策时有意识地思考。我们的研究采用了一种新颖的观点，即消费者的潜意识可能具有某些优势，并可以用来帮助消费者做出复杂的购买决定，尤其是当人们的昼夜节律（一天中最佳的决策时间，例如上午与晚上）不存在时。遇见。利用无意识思想理论（UTT），我们提出了两个假设，这些假设涉及消费者的无意识思想及其与消费者的昼夜节律偏好之间的相互作用，从而影响决策质量。进行了对照实验以检验我们的假设。研究结果表明，无意识的思维通常比有意识的思维在选择复杂的产品时要胜过有意识的思维，当人们的昼夜节律偏好与决策时间之间存在异步时，这种影响就会放大。新的昼夜节律同步观点丰富了我们对无意识思维对决策影响的理解，有助于解释关于UTT的先前工作中有些混杂的发现，从而有助于UTT文献的发展。