NAVIGATING COMPLEXITY: ESSAYS ON THE IMPACT OF PERCEIVED COMPLEXITY ON TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION AND CONSUMER BEHAVIOR
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This dissertation investigates the role of perceived complexity in shaping individual decisionsrelated to technology adoption and consumer behavior. Across three integrated essays, it develops novel theoretical and empirical frameworks to quantify, reduce, and analyze the effects of complexity in real-world settings. The first essay constructs a multidimensional index of perceived complexity, drawing from behavioral economics, computer science, and development studies. This index, informed by machine learning–derived feature importance scores, captures five core dimensions—task, informational, cost, technological, and situational complexity—providing a robust tool for diagnosing adoption barriers. The second essay applies this framework in a randomized controlled trial (RCT) with over 600 shrimp farmers in Odisha, India, testing whether personalized digital training can reduce complexity perceptions and improve technology uptake. Results reveal that tailored interventions significantly reduce perceived complexity and increase adoption of digital tools. The third essay examines how complexity influences consumer decision-making by experimentally varying choice complexity in a shrimp product selection task with over 1,000 participants. Findings indicate that greater complexity leads to preference-choice misalignment, stress, and reliance on decision heuristics. Together, these essays highlight the critical yet understudied role of perceived complexity in shaping both producer and consumer behavior, offering new insights for policy design and technology diffusion strategies in low- and middle-income countries