The seven deadly consumer biases

The solution is not carrying fewer products or content. One of the beauties of the online world is that there's something for everyone. As Chris Anderson explains in his popular book, "You can find everything out here in the Long Tail." It is within this plethora of options where the content and products that truly meet people's needs are found, and where companies ultimately make more money.

So if carrying less is not the answer, what is? The online world has devised numerous strategies in an attempt to guide users to products and content that will best meet their needs. Many large sites employ the efforts of skilled merchandisers or editors armed with aggregated analytics data to help point the way, and others rely on crowdsourcing techniques such as ratings and reviews to narrow down the choices.

While the above methods can be valuable in navigating the quagmire of choice, they all suffer from one major problem: bias. Bias comes in a number of guises, and we will walk through seven of the most common and detrimental here. In the end there is hope, though, as there are new technologies capable of largely evading these biases.

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