Mixing It Up: Unsystematic Product Arrangements Promote the Choice of Unfamiliar Products

This research examines how the unsystematic (vs. systematic) spatial arrangement of a set of alternatives affects consumers’ product choices. The key hypothesis is that an unsystematic product arrangement—in which an assortment consisting of several alternatives is arranged in an apparently arbitrary manner—causes greater perceptual disfluency, which in turn triggers more extensive exploratory product search, ultimately promoting the choice of...