Brief Commentary: A Reexamination of the Effect of Forced Choice on Choice

Abstract When conducting studies in which the dependent variable is choice, researchers must decide whether to require participants to select one of the available alternatives or to provide a no-choice option. Prior research published in the Journal of Marketing Research proposed that no-choice options can disproportionately reduce the share of certain alternatives, particularly all-average or compromise options. In this commentary, I reexamine these propositions. I report the results of nine well-powered, preregistered replications of the original studies, which support only a subset of these hypotheses. Importantly, across these replication studies, no-choice options do not systematically draw share from specific alternatives. These findings suggest that no-choice effects may be more nuanced than previously thought and that the conditions under which previously documented effects occur reliably remain unclear. I discuss the implications of these results for theories of decision-making, context effects, and choice deferral. This work aims to update the literature and inform marketing researchers about the consequences of forcing choice versus allowing a no-choice option in experimental design.