Behind the Veil of Choice: Testing the Effect of Decision Information and Decision Structure Interventions in a Self-Service Food Setting

Through a series of three high powered studies, this thesis explores and measures responses to two different nudging interventions related to price display and serving utensils in a self-service food environment. Study 1 (N = 400) reveals that people intuitively think displaying price in kilograms as opposed to hectograms will lead to a reduction in the amount of food purchased, and that using tongs instead of spoons has no effect on purchasing behavior. In contrast to these findings, a pre-registered field study conducted in study 2 (N = 1965) measuring actual purchasing behavior revealed that price display did not affect purchasing behavior, but that swapping spoons for tongs resulted in a statistically significant reduction of food purchased. In exploring the underlying mechanisms of these findings, study 3 (N = 2447) suggests that the relationship between serving utensils and amount of food served is mediated by both satisfaction and serving effort. Altogether, this paper highlights that different serving utensils can alter purchasing behavior, and that people’s intuition regarding behavioral responses does not always correspond to actual behavior. Furthermore, study 3 extends the current literature by suggesting that serving effort alone cannot explain the change in amount of food served caused by swapping serving utensils as thought in previous research, and proposes satisfaction as an additional underlying mechanism. Keywords: Nudge, choice architecture, pre-registration, field study, decision information, decision structure, effort, satisfaction