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Tradeoffs And Depletion In Choice, Jing Wang, Nathan Novemsky, Ravi Dhar, Roy Baumeister

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Four experiments examine why choices deplete executive resources. The authors show that the resolution of trade-offs is a driver of depletion effects arising from choice, and the larger the trade-offs, the greater is the depletion effect. The authors also find that choice difficulty not related to trade-offs does not influence the depleting effect of the choices. Finally, the authors find that though people can intuit some depletion effects, they do not intuit that choices or trade-offs within choices might be depleting and therefore fail to predict that larger trade-offs are more depleting.