We settle for the first option that's good enough.
Choosing a restaurant for dinner doesn't mean comparing every option in the city. We pick the first one that's good enough (nearby, familiar, doesn't look bad) and get on with our day. That behavior is called satisficing.
Herbert Simon proposed that we operate with "bounded rationality." In complex environments with incomplete information, instead of looking for the optimal decision, we choose one that's good enough. He called this approach satisficing, a blend of "satisfy" and "suffice." We settle for a solution that meets the goal and skip analyzing every possible option.
Evaluating every available alternative before deciding has a real cost in time and effort. Stopping at the first "good enough" option saves that cost, in exchange for giving up the certainty of having found the best possible option.
Source: Simon, H. A. (1956). Rational Choice and the Structure of the Environment. Psychological Review, 63(2), 129-138.
A catalog with too many options forces users to compare more than they're willing to, which makes choosing harder. Narrowing the options down to a handful of "good enough" alternatives tends to increase conversion more than offering more variety.
This concept is the foundation of our article What Is Behavioral Science?
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