We often assume that having many choices is a good thing, and this has been reflected in several settings we have looked at in class: if you are selling your house or auctioning an item, you do better if you have many potential buyers than if you have few; if you are negotiating on how to split up $1, you have more negotiating power if you have many choices of negotiating partners (or more precisely, if you have many possible partners who themselves have few choices). Conversely, buyers or negotiators with fewer options end up paying closer to their IPVs for goods or getting the short end of the bargain in negotiations.

However, at times having too many choices can be a bad thing. There are many interpretations of this statement. One of them applies to too many choices for individuals having a negative effect on a population as a whole. We have seen this in Braess’ paradox in the context of traffic networks, where drivers are actually better off if they either have fewer choices or if we tell them what to do (and enforce it with laws or tolls) than if we give them an extra choice of a road.

Another implication is that individuals having too many choices leads to many individuals ‘choosing not to choose’. This is the topic of research of covered in the APA article “Too many choices?” by Tori DeAngelis. The researchers examine the psychological factors of making consumer choices, and find that having too many options often leads people to refrain from buying altogether. Although this work emphasizes the role of psychology in this type of indecisiveness, the principle seems to be more general than that. Whenever one has choice, one also has the pressure of making the right choice. It’s the old addage of the hungry donkey who, stuck equidistant between two bales of hay, cannot make up his mind which way to go and so starves.

In the general case, the “too much choice is a bad thing” phenomenon at least implies that well-connected nodes in a network may sometimes have a harder time than not-so-well connected ones. Internet servers which have relatively many connections have to process more information–all the possible paths through the network–before they can determine the shortest path to a given destination. Thus even if a well-connected internet node has more choices for which way to send data, it suffers from having to work harder before it can make use of that advantage–a server that has only one external link has less choice, but can avoid worrying about finding the optimal path.