Is freedom to choose a good thing for everyone?

We tend to assume that freedom of choice is universally beneficial and freely available to all consumers – but, says Simona Botti, it may be time to challenge those assumptions

There is a vast literature on choice freedom in the consumption context,” says London Business School Professor of Marketing Simona Botti. “Consumers make choices every day. Some are big decisions regarding, for example, which house to buy or what health treatment to undergo; others are small and so routine that we barely think of them as a choice, such as what brand of beans to purchase at the grocery store or which route to take to work.” According to Simona, there is an assumption that choice freedom is a good thing and available to everyone; in reality, choice freedom does not always improve wellbeing and there are whole classes of consumers who are unable to take full advantage of marketplace opportunities.

A framework for choice freedom

As someone whose work focuses on understanding how the perception and exercise of personal control influence consumer satisfaction and wellbeing, Simona was asked by the Journal of Consumer Psychology (JCP) to review the existing body of work on choice freedom and to examine the relationship between choice freedom and personal and societal wellbeing. This was subsequently published as an article in the JCP entitled Choice Freedom.

Co-authored with Sheena Iyengar of Columbia Business School, Columbia University, and Ann McGill of Booth School of Business, University of Chicago, the article proposes a framework that achieves two main aims: to structure extant research by identifying the benefits and costs of choice freedom, as well as ways to overcome these costs; and to propose future research on choice freedom, including research into the social good and the role of technology.

Benefits and costs of choice freedom

According to Simona, “Individuals generally experience psychological distress when their choice freedom is threatened or restrained; however, the exercise of choice freedom may also negatively impact psychological wellbeing when it conflicts with sociocultural norms.” Here she refers to research comparing cultural differences; for example, those between India and the US. In the former, individual actions tend to be perceived as related to their social surroundings, whereas in the US they are more likely to be perceived as the result of independent decisions. Hence, choice freedom results in a stronger feeling of autonomy and greater satisfaction with the choice outcome in the US than it does in India. A different tension arises when considering that choice freedom can increase satisfaction with the choice outcome, but it can also increase emotional and cognitive costs as well as perceptions of personal responsibility, which may lead to lower wellbeing.

“This is a potential issue in the domain of healthcare,” says Simona, “where choice freedom involving difficult, potentially even tragic, choices can result in suboptimal decisions and lower patient satisfaction.”

Practical implications

If this all sounds quite theoretical, there are practical implications for what can be done. From a marketing perspective, the article examines different ways in which choices can be structured to increase the benefits and decrease the limits of choice freedom; this ensures that consumers get the most out of the freedoms they are provided with, and that organisations get the most out of their investments in providing these freedoms. “If you run a restaurant, for example, it should cost more to offer 20 dishes than to have a fixed menu, so if you’re going to do that you’d better make sure the consumer gets utility out of it,” Simona reasons. “What is the utility to the consumer of the freedom that is being provided? How can this utility be increased through the choice architecture?”

The social good and the role of technology

With regard to future research on the tension between individual freedom of choice and the wider social good, the paper refers to the global Covid-19 pandemic to highlight the topicality of the issue. During the pandemic, the negative externalities of choice freedom were at the centre of the public debate as people invoked choice freedom when it came to decisions such as whether to wear masks, get vaccinated or show proof of immunity to have access to the workplace. Simona says: “These are all decisions on which consumers have no expertise and yet they deliberately wanted to preserve freedom of choice – even when the very act of preserving this freedom might have increased others’ risks of engaging in ordinary day-to-day activities.”

This begs the question of whether a choice is truly individual when it changes the calculation others must make about shopping, attending class, or going to work: an emphasis on freedom of choice can blind consumers to some of the outcomes that a choice entails. Another – and very pressing issue – around choice freedom stems from the increasing use of technology in our everyday lives. “How can we reconcile people’s desire for choice freedom with their increasing tendency to delegate choices to devices powered by artificial intelligence?” asks Simona. The question highlights another related paradox: delegation to AI-powered devices enables consumers to access customised services that effectively match their revealed preferences and available options, but research shows a basic human reluctance to hand over decision-making power to others, including machines.

Setting the agenda

“It’s about setting the agenda for the future based on the reality of where we are now and what we know,” says Simona. “We live in a world where we are constantly bombarded with more options, calls to make more choices, and opportunities to customise what we have, so we are constantly being given more choice freedom.” Research to date has tended to centre largely around individual liberty, but the paper suggests that it could extend to understanding the role of others in choice and the limiting effects of choice freedom on the liberty of others. New research could also examine the extent to which consumers really experience choice freedom, because numerous groups of at-risk and vulnerable consumers – including, but not limited to, individuals with lower socioeconomic status, minorities, people with addictions or disabilities and older people – are unable to take full advantage of marketplace opportunities as they are restricted in their access to and control over resources.

Simona concludes with a startling suggestion for future work: “An examination of choice freedom that goes beyond selecting options from a choice set and acknowledges that there are different levels of freedom could open the door to a powerful new idea: freedom is not only about discerning an option but about construing, and even creating, a new one altogether.”

Simona Botti is Professor of Marketing at London Business School