Whereas the literature on choice overload has shown that people tend to defer their choice or experience less satisfaction under choice proliferation, this paper aims to test how the profusion of choice directly affects individuals’ revealed preferences over options. To do so, we run an experiment where subjects have to compare familiar (i.e., easy, salient and relatively safe) and unfamiliar options under different choice contexts (Large or Small choice sets). We hypothesize that, as the choice set expands, the decisions become harder and more costly and subjects may find familiar items relatively more attractive. Our results provide clear evidence of set size dependence of revealed preferences: Subjects prefer familiar items more frequently in larger choice sets. This evidence is robust to a number of experimental variations and statistical controls.

而关于选择过载的文献已经表明人们倾向于推迟他们的选择或在选择扩散下体验较少的满足感，本文旨在测试选择的丰富如何直接影响个人对选择的显示偏好。为此，我们进行了一项实验，受试者必须在不同的选择上下文（大或小选择集）下比较熟悉的（即简单的、突出的和相对安全的）和不熟悉的选项。我们假设，随着选择集的扩大，决策变得更加困难且成本更高，并且受试者可能会发现熟悉的项目相对更具吸引力。我们的结果提供了显示偏好的集合大小依赖性的明确证据：在较大的选择集中，受试者更喜欢熟悉的项目。这一证据对许多实验变化和统计控制都是可靠的。