Title: Assessment of income group based on features causing decision paralysis

Authors: Debadrita Panda; Debashis Das Chakladar; Tanmoy Dasgupta

Addresses: University of Burdwan, Bardhaman, West Bengal – 713104, India ' IIT Roorkee, Azad Wing-39, Roorkee, Uttarakhand – 247667, India ' University of Burdwan, Bardhaman, West Bengal – 713104, India

Abstract: According to Barry Schwartz, a psychology professor, "people do not make decisions based on what's the most important, but based on what's the easiest to evaluate." This directly opposes the thought of providing too many choices to consumers, which has been treated as a very common process to win the minds of consumers. But it has a side effect of making consumers confused. Searching for information, 'best deal' has become an 'obligation rather than opinion' which in long run results in stress, sub-optimal decisions (Mitchell and Papavassiliou, 1999). This is the scenario where decision paralysis originated. This current study aims to find the factors restricting the decision-making process of consumers while purchasing consumer durable as well as luxury items. Along with feature extraction, classification using random forest has been performed with 98.20% accuracy. This study provides a guideline for marketers to categorise consumers into 'higher' or 'lower' income groups based on decision paralysis features.

Keywords: decision paralysis; consumer decision making; feature extraction; classification.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIS.2023.128662

International Journal of Business Information Systems, 2023 Vol.42 No.2, pp.210 - 223

Received: 12 Dec 2019
Accepted: 26 Mar 2020
Published online: 01 Feb 2023 *

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