Research Article Choice Overload, Satisficing Behavior, and Price Distribution in a Time Allocation Model Francisco Álvarez, 1 José-Manuel Rey, 2 and Raúl G. Sanchis 3,4 1 Department of Quantitative Economics, Complutense University of Madrid, Campus de Somosaguas, 28223 Madrid, Spain 2 Department of Economic Analysis, Complutense University of Madrid, Campus de Somosaguas, 28223 Madrid, Spain 3 RCC at Harvard University, 26 Trowbridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA 4 Department of Economics, Carlos III University of Madrid, c/Madrid 126, 28903 Madrid, Spain Correspondence should be addressed to Jos´ e-Manuel Rey; j-man@ccee.ucm.es Received 1 November 2013; Revised 6 February 2014; Accepted 7 February 2014; Published 20 March 2014 Academic Editor: Juan C. Cortes Copyright © 2014 Francisco ´ Alvarez et al. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Recent psychological research indicates that consumers that search exhaustively for the best option of a market product—known as maximizers—eventually feel worse than consumers who just look for something good enough—called satisfcers. We formulate a time allocation model to explore the relationship between diferent distributions of prices of the product and the satisfcing behavior and the related welfare of the consumer. We show numerically that, as the number of options becomes large, the maximizing behavior produces less and less welfare and eventually leads to choice paralysis—these are efects of choice overload—whereas satisfcing conducts entail higher levels of satisfaction and do not end up in paralysis. For diferent price distributions, we provide consistent evidence that maximizers are better of for a low number of options, whereas satisfcers are better of for a sufciently large number of options. We also show how the optimal satisfcing behavior is afected when the underlying price distribution varies. We provide evidence that the mean and the dispersion of a symmetric distribution of prices—but not the shape of the distribution— condition the satisfcing behavior of consumers. We also show that this need not be the case for asymmetric distributions. 1. Introduction Facing a consumer decision in the market in the Western world today entails considering a very large number of options. From shopping at a modern supermarket to buying online, daily experience seems to highlight that a consumer choice is quite a demanding task in terms of processing all the available information in the relevant market. Psychological research [1, 2] has recently revealed several adverse efects associated with such overload of choices, mainly the so-called paradox of choice and the paralysis efect. Te former suggests the fact that an explosion of choice afects consumers’ welfare in a way that “more is less.” Tis is manifested in the shape of an inverted  for the welfare with respect to number of options, what implies that a consumer is less satisfed when facing a choice problem with a large number of options. Te paralysis efect refers to situations in which the overload is perceived so important that consumers choose not to choose. Rational time allocation was proposed in [3] as an underlying framework to account for choice overload efects in a market with an increasing number of options. While choice overload is not considered a universal phenomenon [4], the analysis of the model in [3] reproduced the efects described above under certain natural conditions, for example, about consumer’s preferences over time uses. Further research from both economics and psychology [5, 6] suggests the following provoking idea: consumers who exhaustively search for the best product option in the market—maximizers—eventually feel worse than consumers who just look for something “good enough”—called satisf- cers, despite the fact that maximizers get a better deal. To analyze the “satisfcing claim” above a more precise defnition of “satisfcer” is required, which seems to be lacking in the literature. We propose in this paper a defnition for satisfcer that fts well within the time allocation model in [3]. We consider a typical profle of consumer, that is, with a balanced preference among diferent uses of time and with a linear search cost (see Section 2 and [3] for more Hindawi Publishing Corporation Abstract and Applied Analysis Volume 2014, Article ID 569054, 9 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/569054