The Effect Of Assortment Type On Choice-process Satisfaction

With the development of market economy, more products and product information are provided to consumers. While the various product assortment and the decision-making difficulties also become important factors to influence consumers’satisfaction when they are facing the situation. Although the significance of product assortment on consumers’satisfaction has been widely studied, most researchers both inside and outside China focused on the scale of assortment. The type of assortment which is indispensable to understand the way that product assortment influences the consumers’ decision-making difficulties and the choice-process satisfaction were only mentioned in a few foreign papers. Hence, the study of assortment type is significant both in academic research and marketing practice.This study, which was based on Structural Alignment Model, found the different impact on the choice-process satisfaction resulted from assortment types. Also, it touched on the influence mechanism topic. I explored the role of product involvement in this mechanism regarding the product involvement as a regulatory moderator, as well.The thesis consists of five parts. The first part is the introduction, which includes the background, purpose, procedure and the structure of the research; the second part contains literature review on the research of Assortment, Choice-Process satisfaction, Choice Difficulty and Product Involvement. In this part, I carded the choroids of relative research and evaluate them. The third part lays on the theoretical foundation and the development of hypotheses; the fourth part is the study design, which includes two experimental design, corresponding results analysis and discussion; the last part draws conclusion and raises the management implications of this research.By the empirical analysis, testing hypotheses by statistical methods such as analysis of variance and regression analysis, the research reaches conclusions as follows:(1) the choice-process can be influenced by Assortment Type, the alignable assortment can better increase the choice-process satisfaction compared with the non-alignable assortment;(2) the impact on the choice-process satisfaction by Choice difficulty mediates the effects of the impact of assortment type to the choice-process satisfaction;(3) Product involvement moderates the process of the main impact. Specifically, the low-involvement products, instead of the high ones, pose positive impact on choice-process satisfaction.