Häubl & Trifts 2000 (Marketing Science 19(1):4-21) — controlled lab experiment showing interactive decision aids improve decision quality and reduce search effort

Claim: The closest legitimate academic work on interactive web tools is Häubl & Trifts (2000), "Consumer Decision Making in Online Shopping Environments: The Effects of Interactive Decision Aids," Marketing Science 19(1):4-21. A controlled lab experiment showed interactive decision aids improve consumers' decision quality (better matches between purchases and preferences) and reduce search effort.

Source: https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mksc.19.1.4.15178

Confidence: Verified (peer-reviewed).

Caveats:

• Measured decision quality in a simulated store environment, not real-world website conversion.
• 2000 era — pre-modern e-commerce; reproductions in modern contexts not surveyed here.

Why this matters for Candid: Honest defence of why a well-built calculator can be useful — it can genuinely help a buyer choose better. But it specifically does not support the vendor claim that interactive tools "convert" better than static pages. See R5 — Disregard vendor-sourced "interactive content converts better" statistics in client conversations.