Are we over­es­ti­mat­ing the reach of the ‘too-much-choice effect’—the phe­nom­e­non first noted by Iyen­gar and Lep­per (2000) [pdf] and pop­u­larised by Barry Schwartz as the para­dox of choice?

The the­ory states that, con­trary to tra­di­tional eco­nomic prin­ci­ples, the more choice con­sumers have the less sat­is­fied and less likely to decide they are. How­ever, this from the abstract of a recent paper show­ing that we may be giv­ing this the­ory too much cre­dence: 

Core the­o­ries in eco­nom­ics, psy­chol­ogy ‚and mar­ket­ing sug­gest that deci­sion mak­ers ben­e­fit from hav­ing more choice. In con­trast, accord­ing to the too-much-choice effect, hav­ing too many options to choose from may ulti­mately decrease the moti­va­tion to choose and the sat­is­fac­tion with the cho­sen option. To rec­on­cile these two posi­tions, we tested whether there are spe­cific con­di­tions in which the too-much-choice effect is more or less likely to occur. In three stud­ies with a total of 598 par­tic­i­pants, we sys­tem­at­i­cally inves­ti­gated the mod­er­at­ing impact of choice set sizes, option attrac­tive­ness, and whether par­tic­i­pants had to jus­tify their choices. […] Over­all, only choice jus­ti­fi­ca­tion proved to be an effec­tive mod­er­a­tor, call­ing the extent of the too-much-choice effect into question.