Comparison shopping: "The tyranny of small differences"

sholling

sholling

Audioholic Ninja
So it's "the dangers of comparison shopping" versus the misery of buyer's remorse :p. Sounds more like psychobabble intended to justify useless research grants and/or the authors own shopping preferences than anything else :rolleyes:. Some people prefer to grab the first shiny thing that catches their eye and some enjoy maximizing bang for the buck by doing a bit of research. That's part of the joy of having choices.

Perhaps the authors is looking to score a marketing gig with Trabant? :rolleyes:
 
zhimbo

zhimbo

Audioholic General
It's a brief and superficial blog post, but SOME of what they're talking about is pretty darn well determined - especially the bit about "satisficers" vs. "optimizers", that satisficers tend to be happier than optimizers, and that optimizers suffer from buyer's remorse; and satisficers tend to be content, and optimizers tend to spend more on replacement purchases. That's all pretty rock solid.

This is a forum chock full of optimizers of course, and while I accept the research that says what I just summarized, I don't know how much researchers look into comparison shopping/optimizing as it's own reward.

And I do believe that the sorts of people who populate forums like this (or any other hobby, really) are getting a lot out of the process. Look at the amount of traffic on the equipment forums vs. the "use of equipment" forums (the movie and music forums). The same is true for the astronomy forums I frequent: enormous amounts of thought and discussion on the trade-offs of different designs and brands of eyepieces, for example, dwarfing the amount of traffic of people actually talking about *observing*.
 
BoredSysAdmin

BoredSysAdmin

Audioholic Slumlord
While we are on subject on popular psychology you guys might want to start reading - You Are Not So Smart blog. There post might be real eye openers for most of us
 
avnetguy

avnetguy

Audioholic Chief
I think comparisons only really mess with ones mind if they don't have the knowledge to determine what's a "mountain" vs what's a "molehill" to them. A vast majority of (all?) hobby related forums have a bad trend towards making mountains out of molehills in comparisons, most of which the end user will never be able to tell the difference.

I do comparison shopping all the time but always keep in mind the diminishing returns and what things are going to make a "real" difference to me. For an astronomy example, I'm very happy with my plossl eyepieces and even though my friends Ethos is superb it's just not worth the price to me for the difference I saw in the viewing.

Steve
 
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