a). Screenshot of the watch configurators, with default options 

Contexts in source publication

Context 1

... develop configurators for a watch and a laptop, which are a hedonic product and a utilitarian product, respectively. Screenshots of the watch and laptop configurators are shown in Figure 2. All of the attributes of the watch can be considered hedonic attributes, meaning that customer choices are based purely on their subjective preferences. No expertise in watches is needed to finish the configuring task. The laptop's attributes are utilitarian. The choices are determined by customers' functional requirements. A certain amount of background knowledge is needed to finish the configuring task. Because the purpose of this paper is to study which factors affect customer decisions when default choices are presented and customers' satisfaction with the configured product and the configuring process, the comparative study is conducted using a traditional single choice-based configurator. Thus, the four types of configurators used in this paper are developed as shown in Table 1. For each product, the base configurator is the normal version without default options. This is the configurator used as the control group. For the other versions, each attribute has a default option. To eliminate the effect of option difference on customers' choices, we randomly assign the default options for each experiment participant. It means that for difference customers, the default options encountered in the configuration tasks are different as well. This configurator is used to investigate consumers' decision behaviour. The default option for each attribute is also randomly selected for each experiment subject. This could offset the influence of choice on consumers' ...

Context 2

... on the tables, we can see that for most attributes, the distributions of customer choices are significantly different, as the corresponding p-value is small. This means that default options affect customers' decisions during the configuring process. We notice that only the watch frame in watch, screen resolution and hard disk in laptop don't have significant difference between the base configurators and the default option-based configurators. After further investigation, we found that the choices for these three attributes either have very strong dominance relationship in terms of customer preferences (screen resolution or hard disk), or very heterogeneous customer preferences (watch frame, the choices can be found in Figure 2). For the former case, customers tend to choose the clearly superior choices regardless of the default options. For the latter case, customers' choices are purely determined by the preferences. Default options can hardly change their intrinsic ...

Context 3

... develop configurators for a watch and a laptop, which are a hedonic product and a utilitarian product, respectively. Screenshots of the watch and laptop configurators are shown in Figure 2. All of the attributes of the watch can be considered hedonic attributes, meaning that customer choices are based purely on their subjective preferences. No expertise in watches is needed to finish the configuring task. The laptop's attributes are utilitarian. The choices are determined by customers' functional requirements. A certain amount of background knowledge is needed to finish the configuring task. Because the purpose of this paper is to study which factors affect customer decisions when default choices are presented and customers' satisfaction with the configured product and the configuring process, the comparative study is conducted using a traditional single choice-based configurator. Thus, the four types of configurators used in this paper are developed as shown in Table 1. For each product, the base configurator is the normal version without default options. This is the configurator used as the control group. For the other versions, each attribute has a default option. To eliminate the effect of option difference on customers' choices, we randomly assign the default options for each experiment participant. It means that for difference customers, the default options encountered in the configuration tasks are different as well. This configurator is used to investigate consumers' decision behaviour. The default option for each attribute is also randomly selected for each experiment subject. This could offset the influence of choice on consumers' ...

Context 4

... on the tables, we can see that for most attributes, the distributions of customer choices are significantly different, as the corresponding p-value is small. This means that default options affect customers' decisions during the configuring process. We notice that only the watch frame in watch, screen resolution and hard disk in laptop don't have significant difference between the base configurators and the default option-based configurators. After further investigation, we found that the choices for these three attributes either have very strong dominance relationship in terms of customer preferences (screen resolution or hard disk), or very heterogeneous customer preferences (watch frame, the choices can be found in Figure 2). For the former case, customers tend to choose the clearly superior choices regardless of the default options. For the latter case, customers' choices are purely determined by the preferences. Default options can hardly change their intrinsic ...