Asymmetric Variety Seeking in Hierarchical Choices

People frequently navigate hierarchical decision-making environments, where higher- stages choices contain the options available at lower stages (e.g., choosing a restaurant entails another choice among dishes). While variety-seeking is a well-established phenomenon in consumer research, little is known about how a choice’s position within a hierarchical choice structure might influence variety-seeking behavior. Across eleven pre-registered experiments (N = 3,907), we document a robust asymmetry in variety-seeking across hierarchical stages: people simultaneously seek more variety at higher stages of a choice structure while seeking less variety (i.e., concentrating their choices) at lower stages . We rule out various alternative accounts, such as seeking an optimal stimulation level, and determine that hierarchical variety seeking is a goal- directed behavior: by default, consumers often hold a goal of finding the best higher-stage option, and they use differential variety seeking to do so. When seeking the best lower-stages option, however, their allocation of variety seeking changes to become more symmetrical. Together, these findings demonstrate that hierarchical positioning is not merely a contextual feature of decision environments but it also fundamentally shapes the underlying psychology of how people explore variety versus concentrate their choices across different stages.