The advent of internet shopping brings countless options for consumers. In response, online retailers aim to facilitate search by attaching descriptive terms to their inventory (e.g., product genres or categories). Called “tagging,” such a practice has been shown to increase product visibility/exposure in an otherwise limitless sea of options. Across five distinct platforms covering a gamut of consumer domains (i.e., food recipes, mobile games, books, videos, and journal publications), we find that the benefits of tagging for product visibility/exposure come with unexpected costs. Indeed, though assigning more tags to a product does indeed boost its visibility/exposure online, doing so also hurts said product’s perceived quality. This effect emerges regardless of proxies used to quantify (i) visibility/exposure or (ii) product liking. We draw on categorization and learning research to explain these results. While multi-tagging increases the likelihood of a product to appear in consumers’ search, it also increases the likelihood of a mismatch between what consumers really sought and what said product can actually deliver.

网络购物的出现为消费者带来了无数的选择。作为回应，在线零售商旨在通过将描述性术语附加到他们的库存（例如，产品类型或类别）来促进搜索）。这种被称为“标记”的做法已被证明可以在无限的选择海洋中提高产品的可见性/曝光率。在涵盖各种消费领域（即食品食谱、手机游戏、书籍、视频和期刊出版物）的五个不同平台中，我们发现标记产品可见性/曝光的好处伴随着意想不到的成本。事实上，尽管为产品分配更多标签确实提高了其在线可见度/曝光率，但这样做也会损害所述产品的感知质量。无论用于量化（i）可见性/曝光或（ii）产品喜好的代理如何，都会出现这种效果。我们利用分类和学习研究来解释这些结果。虽然多标签增加了产品出现在消费者搜索中的可能性，