A Study of Consumer Decision Delegation in Financial Services: Approaches and Implications

Extant literature covering consumer decision making is concerned in the main with situations where consumers make decisions on their own initiative following information search and evaluation of alternatives. However, an alternative perspective posits that consumers in some cases delegate the responsibility for making a decision to a third party, engaging in what Aggarwal and Mazumdar (2008) termed “decision delegation.” The same phenomenon has also been referred to in the literature as “choice delegation” (Broniarczyk and Griffin 2014). The existence of decision delegation strategies has been shown by a number of studies (Chhabra and Olshavsky 1985). Broniarczyk and Griffin (2014) argue that decision delegation can alleviate the stressful emotions connected with making a decision and minimize the need for cognitive trade-offs and mental effort.