doi: 10.18178/joebm.2026.14.4.967
Research on the Status Quo Bias in Consumer Decisions
Meiti Chen
- Beijing Aidi School, Beijing, China
- Manuscript received August 12, 2026
- accepted August 8, 2026
- published October 28, 2026
Abstract
Consumer decisions are almost always shaped by cognitive biases rather than rational deliberation, and default options are ubiquitous in digital service markets for shaping user behavior, so this paper offers a very clear and well-structured analysis of status quo bias in consumer decisions. First, it defines the bias using the original academic literature and explains its psychological underpinnings, then reviews the field experiment by Sahni, Miller, and Strulov-Shlain on auto-renew subscriptions with over 2 million users, followed by three concrete everyday examples of how companies use default strategies in practice. The paper draws a notable and vital conclusion: approximately 50% of automatic renewal subscribers paid for unneeded services, while over 40% were unaware of upcoming automatic recurring charges.
Keywords
- the status quo bias
- default options
- consumer decision-making
- auto-renew subscriptions
- behavioral economics are all related concepts
How to Cite
Meiti Chen, "Research on the Status Quo Bias in Consumer Decisions," Journal of Economics, Business and Management, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 349-351, 2026. https://doi.org/10.18178/joebm.2026.14.4.967
Copyright & License
Copyright © 2026 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).