ICLE Issue Brief

Too Much on the Menu: Disclosure Overload and Crowding Out in Food-Delivery Regulation

Executive Summary

The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) advance notice of proposed rulemaking for online food-delivery services considers requiring platforms to display, itemize, explain, and repeatedly disclose fees throughout an order. This review examines two potential costs. Disclosure overload occurs when excessive information impairs comprehension. Crowding out occurs when mandated content consumes limited attention and screen space, displacing information consumers value more.

Research supports clear, timely disclosure of known mandatory fees. Studies of drip pricing show that concealing such fees behind low headline prices distorts choices. The evidence offers less support for early estimates of charges that depend on a customer’s cart, address, or delivery window. It also does not establish the value of separate narratives for every fee, prescribed prominence, or repetition across screens.

Additional disclosure does not always improve decisions. Consumers struggled with overlapping federal mortgage forms, while a later consolidation that cut word count by 65% improved comparison shopping and borrowing terms. Other studies find that clutter reduces compliance, numerical complexity impairs understanding, and repeated warnings lose their effect. On food-delivery screens, extensive fee displays could displace menu prices, delivery estimates, comparison tools, and allergen or nutrition information. Direct evidence from mobile ordering interfaces remains limited.

Section 18 of the Federal Trade Commission Act requires the FTC to assess a rule’s effects on consumers and small businesses. The Commission should prohibit concealed mandatory fees and false fee representations while testing more prescriptive requirements before adopting them. Tests in actual mobile ordering interfaces should compare alternative formats, measure displacement, distinguish first-time users from repeat customers, and give field results greater weight than laboratory estimates.

I.         Introduction: The Limits of Mandated Disclosure

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is considering rules that could require online food-delivery platforms to display extensive pricing and fee information. A platform might have to show the total price, itemize each fee, explain its purpose and refundability, estimate charges that vary by order, and repeat these disclosures throughout the ordering process. This literature review examines whether disclosures of that breadth would help consumers make better decisions.

The FTC’s advance notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPRM) asks 65 questions.1F1F[1] Many concern the content, timing, and presentation of possible disclosures. The Commission asks whether platforms should prominently display a total price, identify and explain fees excluded from that price, estimate variable charges, disclose who receives each fee, and explain how promotions, memberships, in-store prices, and personalized pricing affect what consumers pay. It also considers requiring disclosures before consumers begin an order and everywhere a platform displays a price (Questions 35, 37–38, 41–42, 44–46, 48–52, 59, and 63; Federal Trade Commission 2026a, 20,388–91).

Taken together, these questions contemplate a substantial block of required text and numbers. Much of that information would appear on a smartphone, where most food-delivery transactions occur and screen space remains scarce. A single disclosure may inform an attentive consumer. The relevant question is whether combining and repeating many disclosures would inform consumers better than a leaner design.

The International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) reached six broader conclusions in its May 18, 2026, comments on the ANPRM (Albrecht et al. 2026):

1. The current record does not satisfy the prevalence, consumer-expectation, and benefit-cost showings that Section 18 of the Federal Trade Commission Act requires before the FTC issues a proposed rule.
2. Existing Section 5 enforcement already reaches hidden mandatory fees and false representations about fees. The enforcement record alone does not justify a sectorwide rule.
3. Any rule should distinguish drip pricing—the strategic withholding of known mandatory fees—from later disclosure of charges that cannot be calculated until the customer selects items and provides a delivery location.
4. Cost-of-service requirements would regulate fee levels, exceed disclosure regulation, and fall outside the Commission’s Section 18 authority.
5. Any rule should apply neutrally to third-party platforms and merchants operating their own delivery services, with safe harbors or model templates for small operators.
6. Requiring platforms to compress variable fees into a single figure could create a de facto price cap and reduce service in rural, low-density, and late-night markets where consumers have few alternatives.

This review addresses a narrower question that arises only if the Commission moves toward a proposed rule: Which disclosure requirements does the evidence support, and which risk repeating documented failures in other markets?

Two issues guide the review. The first is disclosure overload. Beyond some point, additional required information may reduce comprehension and decision quality. Several mechanisms can produce this result. Important information may lose salience, meaning it no longer stands out enough to attract attention. Consumers may become habituated to repeated messages or disengage and stop reading altogether.

The second issue is crowding out. Consumer attention and screen space are finite. Requiring one disclosure may divert attention from another or displace information that consumers value more, such as delivery times, allergens, or nutrition facts. This concern becomes particularly acute on mobile screens.

The literature draws an important distinction between transparent pricing and exhaustive disclosure. Evidence strongly supports requiring platforms to reveal known mandatory fees before consumers invest substantial time in an order. Research on drip pricing shows that withholding such fees until checkout distorts choices and leads consumers to spend more than they intended. Timely disclosure of known mandatory charges promotes honest comparison shopping.

That evidence does not establish that platforms should display every possible detail at every stage. Nor does it justify treating a fee that cannot be calculated until the consumer completes a cart and supplies an address as equivalent to a known fee deliberately withheld until checkout.

Research from other markets also cautions against excessive or poorly designed disclosures. Borrowers understood mortgage terms better after regulators consolidated and shortened the required forms. Visual clutter reduces compliance, repeated warnings lose effectiveness as consumers tune them out, and long lists of variable charges may confuse more than they clarify. Recognizing these limits, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Federal Communications Commission, and U.S. Department of Transportation have used or endorsed layered disclosures, links, and limits on required information instead of placing every detail in a single display.

The case for crowding out has strong theoretical support, and regulators have acknowledged the problem. Empirical research has rarely measured how competing disclosures affect consumers on an actual ordering screen, though. Section 18 requires the Commission to assess a rule’s costs. The Commission therefore should not assume away the costs of overload and crowding out. It should test competing disclosure designs with real consumers before imposing a uniform mandate.

II.      Disclosure Overload: Evidence and Limits

Disclosure overload occurs when the volume, complexity, or repetition of mandated information exceeds consumers’ processing capacity and reduces decision quality. This section examines the scarcity of attention, the evidence supporting targeted disclosure of known fees, the risks posed by accumulation and clutter, and the importance of design, context, and field testing.

A.      Attention Is a Scarce Resource

The economics of attention starts with a basic constraint. Christopher Sims models decision-makers as information-processing channels with finite capacity. Greater attention to one signal leaves less capacity to track others (Sims 2003). Xavier Gabaix’s review of empirical estimates finds that consumers, on average, operate about halfway between full attention and complete inattention (Gabaix 2019). Economic research therefore treats attention as a scarce resource that consumers must allocate among competing demands.

Regulation cannot eliminate that scarcity. Omri Ben-Shahar and Carl Schneider describe the resulting “accumulation problem.” Regulators adopt each disclosure mandate in isolation, while consumers confront the combined demands of every mandate and everything else competing for their time (Ben-Shahar and Schneider 2011). Their review documents the consequences. One clickstream study, which tracked users’ online activity, found that only about one in 1,000 customers opened the terms of a software contract before purchasing. Among those who opened the terms, the median customer spent 29 seconds reading them.

Firms can exploit these limits. Petra Persson models a firm that complies with a disclosure mandate by surrounding the required fact with accurate but irrelevant information. The additional material consumes the customer’s attention and obscures the relevant fact (Persson 2018). If regulators prescribe a simpler format, the firm can complicate the product itself so the relevant information again exceeds the customer’s processing capacity. Persson calls this response “complexification.” Questions 37, 38, and 42 contemplate prominence requirements and separate explanations for each fee. Such mandates could prompt the strategic responses Persson’s model predicts.

B.       Drip-Pricing Research Supports Targeted Disclosure

The advance notice of proposed rulemaking cites two experiments showing that drip pricing harms consumers. Both concern fixed, knowable fees withheld until late in a transaction. Neither examines variable fees that depend on an address, cart, or delivery window. The studies therefore address fee concealment rather than the required timing or format for charges that cannot yet be calculated.

Alexander Rasch, Miriam Thöne, and Tobias Wenzel constructed laboratory markets in which comparing dripped fees imposed a small search cost. Sellers responded by setting the dripped component near the maximum allowed and competing on the base price. Total prices averaged 16.96 experimental units under drip pricing and 15.37 under transparent pricing. In addition, 21% of buyers mistakenly chose the more expensive option (Rasch, Thöne, and Wenzel 2020).

Shelle Santana, Steven Dallas, and Vicki Morwitz found similar effects. Consumers shown dripped add-on fees selected the lower base-price option 54.5% of the time, compared with 11.7% among consumers who saw the fees upfront. Even after seeing the final total, 24.5% of participants in the drip-pricing condition chose the more expensive option, compared with 7.8% in the upfront condition (Santana, Dallas, and Morwitz 2020).

Field evidence also supports a targeted policy against concealment. Tom Blake, Sarah Moshary, Kane Sweeney, and Steve Tadelis conducted a large randomized experiment on StubHub. Delaying mandatory fees until checkout increased revenue by roughly 21%, made buyers 14.1% more likely to complete a purchase, and shifted purchases toward more expensive tickets (Blake et al. 2021). The experiment involved a single fixed fee on a standardized ticket. Food and grocery orders present a different problem because they involve multi-item carts, variable delivery conditions, and comparisons across products and retailers.

Xavier Gabaix and David Laibson explain why competition may fail to correct concealed fees. Their theoretical model shows that firms profit from shrouding add-on charges when enough consumers overlook them. A firm gains little by educating consumers who would then purchase the discounted base product and avoid the profitable add-on (Gabaix and Laibson 2006).

Other research confirms that timely, salient disclosures can change behavior. Raj Chetty, Adam Looney, and Kory Kroft found that posting tax-inclusive prices on grocery shelves reduced demand for treated products by roughly 8%. Survey evidence showed that most consumers already knew the tax applied. Displaying it at the moment of choice made it salient (Chetty, Looney, and Kroft 2009).

Behaviorally designed disclosures have produced similar results in payday lending. Marianne Bertrand and Adair Morse found that showing borrowers the cumulative dollar cost of repeated loan rollovers reduced borrowing by 11% over the next four months (Bertrand and Morse 2011). Jialan Wang and Kathleen Burke found that a Texas mandate requiring a similar disclosure before each payday loan produced a persistent 12% decline in loan volume, with no observable increase in prices or defaults (Wang and Burke 2022).

This evidence supports preventing platforms from concealing known, mandatory fees behind misleading headline prices. It does not establish that the Federal Trade Commission should require every fee to appear at the beginning of a transaction or prescribe a single presentation format. The studies show that concealment distorts choices. They do not compare alternative formats for clearly disclosing known fees.

That distinction tracks ICLE’s comments. Fixed mandatory fees are known in advance, and delaying them can exploit the time a consumer has spent assembling an order. Contingent variable fees cannot be calculated until the consumer supplies an address, cart, or delivery window (Albrecht et al. 2026, 10–11). The evidence supports treating these two categories differently.

C.      Excessive Disclosure Can Reduce Comprehension

For decades, mortgage borrowers received overlapping disclosures under the Truth in Lending Act (TILA) and the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA). The Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Economics tested those forms on 819 borrowers. Roughly 20% could not identify the annual percentage rate, cash due at closing, or monthly payment, and nearly nine in 10 could not identify the loan’s total upfront cost (Lacko and Pappalardo 2007; Lacko and Pappalardo 2010). The FTC economists warned that disclosures containing “too much, irrelevant, or unnecessary information” can cause consumers to ignore the material altogether (Lacko and Pappalardo 2007, 128).

In 2015, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau consolidated the overlapping forms into two documents under the TILA-RESPA Integrated Disclosure rule, commonly called TRID. The change reduced the disclosures’ word count by 65%. Patrick Kielty, K. Philip Wang, and Diana Weng found that first-time homebuyers subsequently paid significantly lower interest rates than repeat buyers, with no offsetting increase in upfront points or fees. The effects were largest in areas with greater lender competition. The authors concluded that “less disclosure makes borrowers better off” when regulators eliminate duplication and complexity (Kielty, Wang, and Weng 2023, 193).

Allison Nicoletti and Christina Zhu likewise found that simplification reduced consumers’ information-processing costs and increased comparison shopping. After the rule took effect, significantly more consumers withdrew applications, apparently because they found better terms elsewhere (Nicoletti and Zhu 2023).

Questions 38 and 42 contemplate requiring platforms to disclose the nature, purpose, amount, refundability, and recipient of every fee, along with a separate explanation for each. The mortgage evidence suggests that such detail can become self-defeating. Food-delivery customers also make low-stakes purchases in minutes and repeat them frequently. Any comprehension cost would recur with each order, rather than arise once during an infrequent, high-stakes transaction.

The Commission has already rejected a similar requirement. In its January 2025 Trade Regulation Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees, which covers live-event ticketing and short-term lodging, the Commission declined to require affirmative disclosure of each fee’s refundability. It found that the requirement could prove impractical for businesses and confusing for consumers (Federal Trade Commission 2025, 90 Fed. Reg. 2,066, 2,102). Question 38 considers that same requirement for food delivery. The Commission should require evidence that food delivery warrants a different result.

Questions 48, 59, and 63 consider requiring fee disclosures wherever a price appears. A food-delivery app may display prices on the restaurant list, menu, item page, cart, and checkout screen. Platforms that allow searches across retailers also display prices in comparison results designed to help customers evaluate competing products. Adding a fee module could consume much of a phone screen and impair that function.

Repeating the same disclosure at each point also creates habituation, the declining neurological and behavioral response to repeated stimuli. Bonnie Brinton Anderson and her coauthors used eye tracking to show that users look at warnings less with each successive viewing (Anderson et al. 2016). Anthony Vance and his coauthors combined functional magnetic resonance imaging, eye tracking, and a three-week field experiment. Adherence to mobile security warnings fell from 87% to 64% with repeated exposure, and brain imaging showed a corresponding decline in response. Changing a warning’s appearance preserved much of its effect (Vance et al. 2018). In a field study of more than 25 million browser warnings, Devdatta Akhawe and Adrienne Porter Felt found that half of users dismissed Chrome’s most common security warning within 1.7 seconds (Akhawe and Felt 2013).

Indiscriminate repetition can also make warnings less informative. Lisa Robinson, W. Kip Viscusi, and Richard Zeckhauser report that 69% of surveyed consumers equated California’s generic Proposition 65 cancer warning on breakfast cereal with the risk of cigarette smoking. They argue that warning systems fail when they attach identical language to risks of vastly different severity, leaving consumers unable to separate the “wolf or puppy” (Robinson, Viscusi, and Zeckhauser 2019). The same evidence suggests that consumers will devote less attention to a fee notice that appears identically on every screen of every order.

Clutter and numerical density create related problems, especially on small smartphone screens. Peter Hancock and his coauthors synthesized 272 effect sizes from 30 warning studies. They found that integrating a warning into the user’s task and including text increased compliance, while visual clutter reduced it (Hancock et al. 2020).

Research involving food choices reports similar effects. Julie Downs, Jessica Wisdom, and George Loewenstein found that raw numerical calorie information had almost no effect on snack choices. Combining calorie information with a separate choice-architecture intervention sometimes reversed that intervention’s effect, showing that stacked policies can interfere with one another (Downs, Wisdom, and Loewenstein 2015). Sarah Campos, Juliana Doxey, and David Hammond’s systematic review found that labels requiring arithmetic confused consumers, while simplified interpretive formats improved their ability to identify healthier options (Campos, Doxey, and Hammond 2011). The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s 2023 review similarly found that consumers often understood simple summary or interpretive labels better than detailed numerical systems, although results varied by design and outcome (Verrill et al. 2023).

Questions 41 and 42 implicate these findings. Itemization at checkout can provide useful information. A customer who sees a small-order fee learns that adding items may avoid it. A customer who sees a distance-based delivery fee learns that ordering from a closer restaurant may cost less. ICLE’s comments defended itemized disclosure on that ground (Albrecht et al. 2026, 12). The overload risk depends on the required level of detail and on mandates to estimate fees that cannot yet be calculated.

The Federal Communications Commission took that concern seriously when it adopted its 2022 broadband consumer label. The agency confined the label to core price terms and directed consumers to hyperlinks for additional detail. It found that expansive on-label disclosures would overwhelm consumers without helping them (Federal Communications Commission 2022, 87 Fed. Reg. 76,959, 76,966). In 2025, the agency proposed trimming the label further because itemizing location-variable fees confused consumers without improving their decisions (Federal Communications Commission 2025, 90 Fed. Reg. 55,713). ICLE’s comments in that proceeding cited behavioral research showing that decision quality declines when disclosure volume exceeds consumers’ processing capacity (Fruits and Westling 2026).

Food-delivery fees that vary by distance, time, traffic, and demand resemble location-variable broadband fees. Requiring platforms to disclose amounts or ranges before a customer provides an address forces platforms to offer either worst-case figures that overstate most customers’ costs or ranges too broad to inform a decision. Both approaches could teach consumers to disregard the disclosure, replicating the disengagement that James Lacko and Janis Pappalardo documented.

D.      Disclosure Effects Depend on Design and Context

Bryan Bollinger, Phillip Leslie, and Alan Sorensen found that mandatory calorie posting at Starbucks reduced average calories per transaction by 6% without harming profits (Bollinger, Leslie, and Sorensen 2011). Pasquale Rummo and his coauthors, analyzing nine years of Taco Bell transactions, associated menu labeling with a 24.7-calorie reduction per transaction (Rummo et al. 2023). In consumer finance, Victor Stango and Jonathan Zinman found that simply surveying consumers about overdraft fees reduced their likelihood of incurring one by 3.7 percentage points from a 26% baseline (Stango and Zinman 2014).

These studies show that a single, salient disclosure of a material fact can improve decisions. They also identify a potential crowding-out cost. A dense fee display could displace calorie and nutrition information that consumers value on the same screen. Yet these studies do not test multiple simultaneous disclosures, prominence requirements, or repetition across screens.

Even the strongest field evidence warrants modest expectations. Michael Long and his coauthors conducted a meta-analysis of menu labeling. When they limited the analysis to the six highest-quality controlled studies in actual restaurants, they found a statistically insignificant reduction of only 7.63 calories per meal (Long et al. 2015).

Several prominent disclosure failures arose from causes other than overload. Sumit Agarwal and his coauthors found that a payment disclosure required by the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009 (CARD Act) had little effect because consumers who paid online rarely saw the monthly statements containing it. The failure concerned delivery rather than consumers’ ability to process the disclosure (Agarwal et al. 2015). The same study found that the CARD Act’s substantive fee limits saved consumers an annualized 1.6% of balances, or roughly $11.9 billion a year. Choosing the right remedy therefore requires identifying why a disclosure failed.

The dysfunction of European cookie-consent banners likewise reflects deliberate manipulation as much as cognitive limits. Dino Bollinger and his coauthors found potential violations on 94.7% of roughly 30,000 websites (Bollinger et al. 2022). Ahmed Bouhoula and his coauthors found that 65.4% of sites offering an opt-out continued collecting data after users refused consent (Bouhoula et al. 2024). Such conduct calls for enforcement against noncompliance and deceptive design.

Research methods also warrant caution. Stefano DellaVigna and Elizabeth Linos compared 126 government nudge trials covering 23.5 million people with results published in academic journals. The published effect sizes were roughly six times larger, and selective publication (also known as publication bias) accounted for about 70% of the gap (DellaVigna and Linos 2022). Their findings counsel caution when extrapolating from the laboratory drip-pricing experiments cited in the advance notice of proposed rulemaking.

The Commission should build its record with field evidence and consumer testing that reflect actual food-delivery interfaces. These platforms present several important categories of information at once. Evidence that a narrow disclosure improved decisions in another market does not establish that additional fee narratives, estimates, and repetition will help food-delivery customers.

The research supports truthful, timely disclosure of known mandatory fees without misleading headline prices. It provides no comparable support for granular explanations of every fee, estimates of charges that cannot yet be calculated, prescribed prominence hierarchies, or repetition on every screen. Those requirements can turn useful disclosure into clutter with measurable costs.

III.    Crowding Out: Theory, Regulatory Experience, and Evidence

Crowding out occurs when mandated content consumes finite attention and display space, displacing information consumers may value more. On food-delivery apps, the disclosures contemplated in Questions 35 through 52 would compete on smartphone screens with menu items, prices, delivery estimates, restaurant ratings, and required allergen and nutrition information. Question 23 asks what could impede disclosure of all mandatory fees before ordering begins and wherever a price appears (Federal Trade Commission 2026a, 20,389). On a mobile interface, the screen itself imposes a practical limit.

The economics of limited attention provides the theoretical basis for this concern. Federal agencies and a state supreme court have treated screen-space displacement as a genuine design constraint, and related studies show that clutter, placement, and screen size affect attention and comprehension. Direct evidence from food-delivery transaction screens remains scarce. This section reviews the theory, regulatory experience, and limits of the empirical record.

A.      Limited Attention Creates Crowding Out

Crowding out applies the same finite-capacity framework to information presented within a limited display. Christopher Sims’s model implies that adding signals reduces a consumer’s capacity to process those already present (Sims 2003). Geoffroy de Clippel, Kfir Eliaz, and Kareen Rozen likewise model consumers who can inspect only a limited number of options. Examining one option necessarily leaves less attention for another (de Clippel, Eliaz, and Rozen 2014).

Petra Persson shows how firms can exploit this constraint. A firm can surround a material disclosure with accurate but irrelevant cues, consuming the attention needed to process the important information (Persson 2018). The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) consumer-policy committee incorporated these findings into its guidance. It advises regulators to limit the scope and prescriptiveness of disclosure mandates and expressly identifies the accumulation problem in online settings (OECD 2022, 33).

B.       Regulators Recognize Screen-Space Constraints

Three federal agencies and one state supreme court have treated limited screen space and attention as material design constraints. Each authority informs the placement and prominence requirements under consideration here.

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s 2024 airline-fee rule required upfront, passenger-specific disclosure of baggage and change fees on the first page of search results. The agency nevertheless allowed pop-ups and expandable text because rigid on-page requirements could “overcrowd web pages” and impair the presentation of fare information on small screens (U.S. Department of Transportation 2024, 89 Fed. Reg. 34,620, 34,646).

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals later vacated the rule on Administrative Procedure Act grounds, and the Department reinstated the prior standard effective July 2, 2026 (U.S. Department of Transportation 2026, 91 Fed. Reg. 40,368). The court’s decision neither endorsed nor rejected the agency’s behavioral judgment. This brief cites the 2024 rule only for that judgment. After a full rulemaking, an agency requiring upfront fee disclosure concluded that flexible presentation was necessary to avoid crowding. Its approach also shows why rigid mandates can impede improvements as technology and consumer behavior change.

The Federal Communications Commission made a similar design choice for its broadband label. It required a compact, standardized display and placed additional detail behind hyperlinks because expansive on-label content would overwhelm consumers (Federal Communications Commission 2022).

The Federal Trade Commission’s 2013 digital-advertising guidance likewise instructs businesses to place required disclosures as close as possible to the claims they qualify. It warns that scrolling makes disclosures easier to miss and specifically addresses the constraints of mobile screens (Federal Trade Commission 2013). The Commission cannot treat mobile screen space as a binding constraint when judging disclosure placement and as costless when considering the number of required disclosures.

The California Supreme Court addressed the same concern in Dowhal v. SmithKline Beecham Consumer Healthcare. The court held that federal law preempted a state warning requirement, relying in part on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s concern about overwarning and the danger of “less meaningful warnings crowding out necessary warnings” (Dowhal v. SmithKline Beecham Consumer Healthcare 2004).

C.      Direct Evidence of Screen-Space Crowding Is Limited

Few studies directly measure how mandated information displaces other content on transaction screens. Related evidence nonetheless indicates that display constraints affect attention and comprehension. Peter Hancock and his coauthors found that clutter within a display reduces compliance with warnings (Hancock et al. 2020). Christine Utz and her coauthors, in field experiments involving more than 80,000 website visitors, found that a consent banner’s placement substantially affected whether users engaged with it (Utz et al. 2019). Christopher Sanchez and James Goolsbee found that small displays impair reading retention unless designers adjust the text size to fit the screen (Sanchez and Goolsbee 2010). The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s review of front-of-package labels found that, under time pressure, labels competing with other package elements can distort consumers’ perceptions of healthfulness (Verrill et al. 2023).

These studies do not answer the precise question before the Commission. No study cited here measures whether a mandated fee module on a menu or cart screen reduces attention to delivery times, allergen information, or price comparisons across platforms. Nor does the literature quantify the resulting consumer harm. Economic theory supports the crowding-out concern, and regulators confronting similar design problems have recognized it. Direct evidence from smartphone transaction screens remains scarce. The Commission should fill that gap through consumer testing before imposing prescriptive requirements.

IV.    Applying the Evidence to the ANPRM

What the evidence supports:

• Prohibiting platforms from concealing fixed mandatory fees behind misleading headline prices would respond to Questions 15a and 48 and accord with the drip-pricing evidence.
• The same principle applies to contingent and variable fees under Questions 16, 41b, and 41c. Platforms should not advertise a price that omits fees they know will apply, even when the exact amount depends on the customer’s address, cart, or delivery window.
• False statements about fees constitute deception under settled Section 5 doctrine.

Provisions that the current record does not support:

• Requiring a total-price display that includes variable components under Questions 35, 36, and 41a forces platforms to provide either estimates or broad ranges. The Commission’s existing Fees Rule excludes analogous shipping charges from the total price because of this practical difficulty (16 C.F.R. § 464.1; Albrecht et al. 2026, 13–14). A shipping-charge exception would not fully address food delivery because the relevant fees can vary with the cart, address, and delivery window.
• Requiring the total price to dominate every other element under Question 37 imposes a prominence hierarchy. Persson’s model shows how firms can respond strategically to such format mandates, while the Federal Communications Commission’s experience demonstrates the risks of prescribing detailed label designs.
• Requiring separate narratives about each fee’s nature, purpose, refundability, and recipient under Question 38 would impose a requirement the Commission rejected in January 2025.
• Repeating disclosures wherever a price appears under Questions 48, 59, and 63 conflicts with the evidence on habituation.
• Adding in-store price-comparison and personalized-pricing disclosures under Questions 51 and 52 would compound the accumulation problem on small screens.

V.      Test Disclosure Mandates Before Adopting Them

Section 18 of the Federal Trade Commission Act requires findings on the prevalence of the targeted practices and an economic analysis of a final rule’s effects on consumers and small businesses (15 U.S.C. § 57a(b), (d)). The evidence on disclosure overload and crowding out identifies three research tasks within the Commission’s demonstrated capacity.

Format testing should precede format mandates. The Bureau of Economics’ mortgage-disclosure project provides a useful model. Researchers first conducted qualitative interviews and then ran controlled experiments comparing existing and prototype disclosures with actual consumers (Lacko and Pappalardo 2007). Here, the Commission should test proposed fee displays within mobile ordering interfaces. It should test first-time and repeat users separately because the advance notice of proposed rulemaking indicates that many customers order repeatedly and may have different baseline expectations (Federal Trade Commission 2026a, 20,381; Albrecht et al. 2026, 8). This research would respond directly to Question 63’s request for evidence that the proposed disclosures improve decision-making.

The Commission should also measure displacement. Researchers can test whether a mandated fee module on menu and cart screens reduces attention to delivery times, allergen information, or comparison tools. Eye tracking, as used by Bonnie Brinton Anderson and Anthony Vance, combined with A/B testing that compares alternative display designs, as used by Christine Utz, could answer the question at modest cost.

The Commission should give field evidence greater weight than laboratory results. Stefano DellaVigna and Elizabeth Linos found that published academic studies reported effects roughly six times larger than government trials conducted under real-world conditions (DellaVigna and Linos 2022). Michael Long and his coauthors likewise found that menu-labeling effects became statistically insignificant when they limited their meta-analysis to the highest-quality controlled studies in actual restaurants (Long et al. 2015).

VI.    Conclusion

The evidence supports a targeted response to deceptive pricing. Platforms should disclose known mandatory fees clearly and before purchase rather than use low headline prices that rise later. Fees that depend on a customer’s cart, address, or delivery window require different treatment because platforms cannot calculate them at the start of an order. The drip-pricing research supports preventing concealment. It does not establish the value of a prescribed format, estimates of unknown charges, or repetition on every screen.

The broader literature cautions against treating more disclosure as inherently better. Consumer attention is finite. Accumulated detail, visual clutter, numerical complexity, and repeated warnings can reduce comprehension and cause disengagement. The Federal Trade Commission’s own mortgage research documented those effects. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau later cut overlapping mortgage disclosures by 65%, and borrowers received better terms. A food-delivery app offers less room and demands faster decisions than a mortgage form.

Crowding out presents a related cost. A mandated fee module can displace delivery estimates, allergen and nutrition information, restaurant ratings, and comparison tools. Economic theory supports that concern, and federal agencies and a state supreme court have recognized it. Direct evidence from food-delivery screens remains limited, which makes consumer testing necessary before the Commission adopts prescriptive requirements.

Section 18 requires the Commission to examine a rule’s effects on consumers and small businesses. The Commission should test competing designs in actual mobile ordering interfaces, measure what information they displace, distinguish first-time users from repeat customers, and give field results greater weight than laboratory estimates. That work can support rules that secure the benefits of honest pricing while avoiding the disclosure failures federal regulators have spent decades documenting and correcting.

Works Cited

• Agarwal, Sumit, Souphala Chomsisengphet, Neale Mahoney, and Johannes Stroebel. “Regulating Consumer Financial Products: Evidence from Credit Cards.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 130, no. 1 (2015): 111–164. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qju037.

Approach: Peer-reviewed natural experiment using panel data.

Findings: The Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act’s limits on credit card fees reduced annual borrowing costs by 1.6% of average daily balances, saving consumers $11.9 billion annually, with no offsetting increase in interest rates. By contrast, a required disclosure showing the savings from repaying balances over 36 months produced only a tiny increase in the share of accounts paying that amount. The authors found “no evidence of a change in overall payments.”

Authors’ Conclusions: Structural fee regulations reduce costs because imperfect competition and non-salient pricing prevent issuers from fully recovering lost fee revenue. The authors attribute the payoff disclosure’s negligible effect to poor delivery: Consumers who pay online rarely view their monthly statements.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Counterevidence. The disclosure failed because consumers rarely saw it during the payment process, rather than because excessive information overwhelmed them.

Relevance to Crowding Out: None. The study examines the delivery of credit card disclosures but does not analyze whether disclosures compete for limited screen space.

• Akhawe, Devdatta, and Adrienne Porter Felt. “Alice in Warningland: A Large-Scale Field Study of Browser Security Warning Effectiveness.” In Proceedings of the 22nd USENIX Security Symposium, 257–272. 2013.

Approach: Peer-reviewed, large-scale field study using browser telemetry data.

Findings: Across more than 25 million browser security warnings, users bypassed 33% of Mozilla Firefox’s Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) warnings and 70.2% of Google Chrome’s. They bypassed about 10% of Firefox’s malware and phishing warnings, compared with 25% of Chrome’s. Users dismissed the most common SSL errors fastest. Half bypassed Chrome’s most common SSL warning in less than 1.7 seconds, a result “consistent with the theory of warning fatigue.”

Authors’ Conclusions: Security warnings can work well when designed effectively, contrary to the assumption that users routinely ignore them. Frequent alerts can nevertheless cause warning fatigue, leading users to dismiss familiar messages without reading them.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Supporting. The evidence of warning fatigue suggests that repeated warnings can prompt rapid dismissal. By extrapolation, a high volume of required disclosures may produce similar overload.

Relevance to Crowding Out: None. The study examines the frequency of warnings over time, rather than whether simultaneously displayed disclosures displace other information on a screen.

• Albrecht, Brian, Eric Fruits, Daniel J. Gilman, and Geoffrey A. Manne. Comments of the International Center for Law & Economics: Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees in Online Food Delivery Services ANPRM, FTC Project No. P267101. International Center for Law & Economics, May 18, 2026. https://laweconcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/FTC-Delivery-Fees-2026.pdf.

Approach: Non-peer-reviewed policy analysis and commentary.

Findings: A single “all-in” pricing rule poses different problems for food-delivery platforms than for hotels or ticket sellers because delivery fees vary with each order. Requiring platforms to disclose every potential variable upfront could force them to display hypothetical estimates or adopt inefficient pricing structures. Yet collapsing all fees into one figure would prevent consumers from identifying charges, such as small-order fees, that they could avoid by changing their carts.

Authors’ Conclusions: The Federal Trade Commission should not adopt a sectorwide food-delivery rule based on its current enforcement record. If the Commission adopts a rule, it should distinguish mandatory fixed fees from contingent variable fees. Excessive detail forces consumers to “[sort] the important points from the minor detail.”

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Direct. The authors cite federal findings that overly detailed disclosures frustrate consumers and cause them to ignore the information altogether.

Relevance to Crowding Out: None. The comment examines the timing and level of detail of variable-fee disclosures, rather than whether disclosures compete for limited screen space or consumer attention.

• Anderson, Bonnie Brinton, Anthony Vance, C. Brock Kirwan, David Eargle, and Jeffrey L. Jenkins. “How Users Perceive and Respond to Security Messages: A NeuroIS Research Agenda and Empirical Study.” European Journal of Information Systems 25, no. 4 (2016): 364–390. https://doi.org/10.1057/ejis.2015.21.

Approach: Peer-reviewed theoretical research agenda and laboratory experiment using eye tracking.

Findings: In an eye-tracking study of 62 participants, attention to security warnings declined significantly with each successive viewing. This decline was significantly smaller for polymorphic warnings, which change their appearance between viewings.

Authors’ Conclusions: People habituate to repeated security messages and unconsciously devote less visual attention to them over time. Changing a warning’s visual presentation can substantially reduce habituation driven by “hidden (automatic or unconscious) mental processes.”

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Supporting. The study shows that repeated warnings lose users’ attention as users become habituated and begin to ignore them unconsciously. By extrapolation, repeated disclosures may produce a similar form of overload.

Relevance to Crowding Out: None. The study measures habituation across successive warnings, rather than whether concurrently displayed information competes for limited screen space or attention.

• Ben-Shahar, Omri, and Carl E. Schneider. “The Failure of Mandated Disclosure.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 159, no. 3 (2011): 647–749. https://home.uchicago.edu/omri/pdf/articles/Mandated_Disclosure.pdf.

Approach: Peer-reviewed literature review and policy analysis.

Findings: The authors document widespread failures of mandated disclosure in consumer credit, online contracts, and other fields. Consumers miscalculated finance charges by 200% because they misunderstood credit terms, suggesting that disclosure had no effect or made decisions worse. In one study of online boilerplate agreements, only about one in 1,000 consumers opened the pre-purchase disclosure, and those who did spent a median of 29 seconds reading it. The authors attribute these failures to cognitive overload and the accumulation of competing mandates: “[T]he accumulation problem arises because so many disclosures assail disclosees.”

Authors’ Conclusions: Mandated disclosure rests on faulty assumptions about human cognition and decision-making. The authors recommend abandoning it as a regulatory technique, rather than trying to improve it through simplification.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Direct. The article explains how cognitive overload impairs consumers’ comprehension of complex disclosures.

Relevance to Crowding Out: Direct. The article identifies an accumulation problem in which each additional disclosure competes for consumers’ finite attention with other disclosures and daily activities.

• Bertrand, Marianne, and Adair Morse. “Information Disclosure, Cognitive Biases, and Payday Borrowing.” The Journal of Finance 66, no. 6 (2011): 1865–1893. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6261.2011.01698.x.

Approach: Peer-reviewed randomized field experiment.

Findings: Disclosures showing payday borrowers the cumulative dollar cost of repeatedly renewing a loan reduced borrowing by 11% over the next four months. A savings-planner treatment designed to encourage self-control had no effect, either alone or combined with the information treatments. By contrast, disclosures designed around borrowers’ cognitive biases “significantly reduce[d] the frequency and amount” of borrowing.

Authors’ Conclusions: Standard mandated disclosures assume that consumers act rationally. Reframing costs to address specific cognitive biases can change behavior. These biases include narrow bracketing, or viewing each loan in isolation, and the “peanuts effect,” or treating small recurring charges as inconsequential. The authors do not claim that targeted disclosures can solve the problems associated with payday borrowing, but they stress their low implementation cost.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Boundary condition. The study shows that simple, behaviorally designed disclosures can improve decisions without causing cognitive overload, even when more complex disclosures might fail.

Relevance to Crowding Out: None. The study tests disclosures delivered in physical envelopes and does not examine whether information competes for limited space in a crowded visual display.

• Blake, Tom, Sarah Moshary, Kane Sweeney, and Steve Tadelis. “Price Salience and Product Choice.” Marketing Science 40, no. 4 (2021): 619–636. https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2020.1261.

Approach: Peer-reviewed, large-scale field experiment.

Findings: On StubHub, hiding mandatory fees until checkout increased revenue by about 21%. Buyers who saw fees only at checkout were 14.1% more likely to complete a purchase and spent 5.42% more, on average. Users who saw fees upfront often left the platform earlier, while those who encountered fees later “differentially exit[ed] at checkout.”

Authors’ Conclusions: Obscuring fees creates search friction that distorts how much consumers buy and which products they choose, steering them toward more expensive tickets. Delayed fees affect even experienced users, likely because calculating final prices imposes additional mental costs.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Counterevidence. Prominent upfront disclosure of mandatory fees improved consumer decision-making, undercutting the claim that additional disclosure necessarily impairs comprehension.

Relevance to Crowding Out: None. The study examines sequential price disclosure and search friction, rather than whether disclosures displace other information within a limited visual space.

• Bollinger, Bryan, Phillip Leslie, and Alan Sorensen. “Calorie Posting in Chain Restaurants.” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 3, no. 1 (2011): 91–128. https://doi.org/10.1257/pol.3.1.91.

Approach: Peer-reviewed natural experiment using transaction data.

Findings: Mandatory calorie posting at Starbucks reduced average calories per transaction by 6%. Changes in food purchases accounted for nearly the entire reduction, while beverage choices changed little. Calories per food item fell by about 14 to 52 calories as consumers bought fewer food items and chose lower-calorie options. The policy did not reduce Starbucks’ average revenue and increased revenue at stores near competitors.

Authors’ Conclusions: Calorie posting changes consumer behavior by increasing knowledge and making calorie information more salient. The study could not directly measure the policy’s long-term effects on obesity or body mass index.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Counterevidence. Adding a required numerical disclosure changed consumer behavior without evidence that the additional information impaired decision-making.

Relevance to Crowding Out: None. The study measures behavioral responses to calorie posting but does not examine whether disclosures compete for limited visual space or attention.

• Bollinger, Dino, Karel Kubicek, Carlos Cotrini, and David Basin. “Automating Cookie Consent and GDPR Violation Detection.” In 31st USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 22), 2893–2910. USENIX Association, 2022. https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec22summer_bollinger.pdf.

Approach: Peer-reviewed, large-scale automated web measurement.

Findings: A scan of about 30,000 websites identified potential violations of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on 94.7% of them. Nearly 70% assumed consent before users made a choice, and 21.3% created cookies after users explicitly withheld consent. The researchers also developed a machine-learning browser extension that automatically filtered about “90% of the privacy-invasive cookies.”

Authors’ Conclusions: GDPR consent mechanisms often fail because website administrators use deceptive practices or disregard users’ choices. Client-side automation can help protect users because regulatory agencies cannot monitor the volume of potential noncompliance.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Context. The prevalence of defective cookie banners shows how mandated consent mechanisms can fail in practice. Attributing those failures to cognitive overload, rather than deceptive design or noncompliance, requires extrapolation.

Relevance to Crowding Out: None. The study examines compliance failures and evasion tactics, rather than spatial or attentional competition among disclosures.

• Bouhoula, Ahmed, Karel Kubicek, Amit Zac, Carlos Cotrini, and David Basin. “Automated Large-Scale Analysis of Cookie Notice Compliance.” In 33rd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 24), 1723–1740. USENIX Association, 2024. https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity24/presentation/bouhoula.

Approach: Peer-reviewed, large-scale automated web measurement.

Findings: The researchers evaluated 97,000 websites subject to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Among sites offering an opt-out option, 65.4% still collected user data after users explicitly withheld consent. Another 73.4% set analytics or advertising cookies before users interacted with the cookie notice. The researchers also found forced-action dark patterns on 46.4% of websites with notices.

Authors’ Conclusions: Widespread noncompliance has rendered the current notice-and-consent framework ineffective. Popular websites were especially likely to display apparently compliant notices while disregarding users’ choices and continuing to collect data. Regulators need automated tools to detect deceptive designs and enforce privacy rules at scale.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Context. The study documents widespread failure within a mandated notice-and-consent system. It attributes that failure to deceptive design and noncompliance, rather than cognitive overload among users.

Relevance to Crowding Out: None. The study examines consent evasion and compliance failures, rather than whether disclosures displace other valuable information or compete for users’ attention.

• Campos, Sarah, Juliana Doxey, and David Hammond. “Nutrition Labels on Pre-Packaged Foods: A Systematic Review.” Public Health Nutrition 14, no. 8 (2011): 1496–1506. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1368980010003290.

Approach: Peer-reviewed systematic review.

Findings: The review examined 120 articles. Although more than 50% of consumers typically reported using nutrition labels, many struggled to apply quantitative nutrition information. Labels that required calculations involving serving sizes caused particular confusion, especially among consumers with less education. Simplified formats, such as front-of-package traffic-light labels, significantly increased “consumer ability to identify healthier food options.”

Authors’ Conclusions: Mandatory nutrition labels offer a cost-effective population-level intervention, but complex numerical formats remain inaccessible to many consumers. Regulators should simplify label content and test new formats that consumers with varying literacy levels can understand.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Supporting. The review finds that dense, calculation-heavy disclosures confuse consumers and impair comprehension.

Relevance to Crowding Out: None. The review examines the format and comprehensibility of individual package labels, rather than spatial competition among multiple disclosures.

• Chetty, Raj, Adam Looney, and Kory Kroft. “Salience and Taxation: Theory and Evidence.” American Economic Review 99, no. 4 (2009): 1145–1177. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.99.4.1145.

Approach: Peer-reviewed field experiment and natural experiment.

Findings: In a grocery-store experiment, displaying tax-inclusive shelf prices reduced demand for treated products by about 8% relative to the control groups. State-level data likewise showed that increases in salient excise taxes reduced alcohol consumption substantially more than equivalent increases in less salient sales taxes. Survey data showed that the median consumer understood the tax status of most goods, indicating that “salience effects,” rather than a lack of knowledge, drove the weaker response to sales taxes.

Authors’ Conclusions: Consumers systematically underreact to less salient taxes because they focus on posted prices while shopping, contrary to the neoclassical assumption that consumers fully account for all costs. Policymakers therefore need both tax-demand and price-demand curves to estimate taxation’s welfare effects accurately.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Counterevidence. Making tax information salient at the point of purchase changed consumers’ choices in the expected direction, indicating that an additional upfront disclosure can improve price comprehension.

Relevance to Crowding Out: Context. The study shows that consumers often overlook less salient price information, consistent with finite attention. It does not directly examine whether disclosures physically displace one another.

• de Clippel, Geoffroy, Kfir Eliaz, and Kareen Rozen. “Competing for Consumer Inattention.” Journal of Political Economy 122, no. 6 (2014): 1203–1234. https://doi.org/10.1086/676931.

Approach: Peer-reviewed theoretical model.

Findings: The authors model consumers with limited capacity to inspect goods across multiple markets. Consumers use market leaders’ prices to decide which markets merit closer examination. This creates “cross-market competition for their inattention,” prompting market leaders to lower prices to avoid scrutiny. As a result, reducing average consumer attention—while holding constant the share of fully inattentive consumers—can increase consumer welfare by lowering average prices.

Authors’ Conclusions: Limited attention creates competition among firms in otherwise independent markets. Partially inattentive consumers may miss the best individual deals, but firms’ efforts to avoid attracting scrutiny can exert downward pressure on prices and benefit consumers overall.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Context. The model assumes that consumers have limited cognitive capacity. Applying that mechanism to comprehension failures caused by mandated disclosures requires extrapolation.

Relevance to Crowding Out: Direct. The model shows how multiple markets compete for finite consumer attention: Investigating one product or market leaves less capacity to examine another.

• DellaVigna, Stefano, and Elizabeth Linos. “RCTs to Scale: Comprehensive Evidence from Two Nudge Units.” Econometrica 90, no. 1 (2022): 81–116. https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA18709.

Approach: Peer-reviewed meta-analysis and review of administrative randomized controlled trials (RCTs).

Findings: Across 126 trials involving 23.5 million people, behavioral nudges implemented at scale, such as simplified communications and reminders, increased target behaviors by an average of 1.4 percentage points. This represented an 8% improvement over the control groups. A meta-analysis of 26 published academic studies found a much larger average effect of 8.7 percentage points. Statistical modeling indicated that publication bias accounted for about 70% of the difference.

Authors’ Conclusions: Behavioral nudges in government settings produce meaningful, statistically significant improvements at low marginal cost. Their effects at scale are much smaller than the published academic literature suggests because journals disproportionately publish large, statistically significant results.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Context. The study finds that simplifying administrative communications can improve take-up, suggesting that reducing informational complexity aids decision-making. This provides indirect evidence for the inverse of disclosure overload.

Relevance to Crowding Out: None. The study compares the effectiveness of large-scale behavioral nudges with published academic findings but does not examine competition among simultaneous disclosures.

• Downs, Julie S., Jessica Wisdom, and George Loewenstein. “Helping Consumers Use Nutrition Information: Effects of Format and Presentation.” American Journal of Health Economics 1, no. 3 (2015): 326–344. https://doi.org/10.1162/ajhe_a_00020.

Approach: Peer-reviewed field and laboratory experiments.

Findings: Providing raw numerical calorie information had almost no effect on midday snack choices compared with providing no information. Combining calorie information with a choice-architecture nudge that placed lower-calorie items earlier in a sequence helped consumers use the information. Poorly combined interventions could backfire. In one experiment, a simple primacy nudge “is completely reversed when calorie information is posted.”

Authors’ Conclusions: Raw information produces little behavioral benefit when consumers find it difficult to process. Simpler heuristic cues, such as traffic-light labels and sequenced choices, show greater promise. Policymakers should test interventions in combination because they can trigger different psychological processes, produce nonadditive effects, or backfire.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Direct. Raw numerical calorie disclosures failed to improve decisions because consumers struggled to process them, while simpler formats proved more effective.

Relevance to Crowding Out: Context. The study shows that multiple interventions can interact and interfere with one another, suggesting that an added disclosure may weaken another nudge. Applying this finding to competition for visual space requires extrapolation.

• Dowhal v. SmithKline Beecham Consumer Healthcare, 32 Cal. 4th 910 (2004). https://scocal.stanford.edu/opinion/dowhal-v-smithkline-beecham-33399.

Approach: Primary legal authority from the California Supreme Court.

Provisions/Holding: The California Supreme Court held that the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act preempted California’s Proposition 65 requirement that nicotine-replacement therapy products carry a reproductive-toxicity warning. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had adopted a uniform, carefully tailored warning about the products’ risks during pregnancy. The agency sought to inform pregnant women without discouraging them from using the products to stop smoking. The FDA rejected the Proposition 65 warning because it “would have the effect of misleading consumers.” The court also cited the “dangers of overwarning and of less meaningful warnings crowding out necessary warnings.”

Procedural Status: The California Supreme Court reversed the judgment of the Court of Appeal.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Direct. The court relied on the FDA’s determination that excessive warnings about remote risks could mislead consumers and prompt medically harmful choices, such as continuing to smoke.

Relevance to Crowding Out: Context. The court expressly recognized that less meaningful warnings can crowd out necessary ones, supporting the concept of attentional displacement.

• Federal Communications Commission. “Empowering Broadband Consumers Through Transparency.” Final rule. Federal Register 87 (December 16, 2022): 76,959–76,980. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/12/16/2022-26854/empowering-broadband-consumers-through-transparency.

Approach: Primary legal authority from an agency rulemaking.

Provisions/Holding: Acting under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the Federal Communications Commission requires broadband internet service providers to display a uniform consumer label at the point of sale. The label must disclose prices, introductory rates, data allowances, and performance metrics. To limit information overload, the Commission requires links to detailed network-management practices and privacy policies instead of placing that information on the label. It concluded that detailed privacy information “would likely overwhelm consumers and not benefit them at the point of sale.”

Procedural Status: The final rule took effect January 17, 2023.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Direct. The Commission excluded detailed network-management and privacy information because complex disclosures could overwhelm consumers, make the label unwieldy, and impede comparison shopping.

Relevance to Crowding Out: Supporting. The Commission recognized that a label has limited space and that excessive detail could obscure more important purchasing information. Applying that conclusion to a broader theory of crowding out requires some extrapolation.

• Federal Communications Commission. “Empowering Broadband Consumers Through Transparency; Delete, Delete, Delete.” Proposed rule. Federal Register 90 (December 3, 2025): 55,713–55,716. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/12/03/2025-21807/empowering-broadband-consumers-through-transparency-delete-delete-delete.

Approach: Primary legal authority from an agency rulemaking.

Provisions/Holding: The Federal Communications Commission proposed eliminating several broadband-label requirements, including verbatim telephone readings, itemization of location-dependent fees, and machine-readable data. The Commission reasoned that these mandates may impose “unnecessary costs and burdens on providers” without making the labels more useful to consumers. It explained that a visual label does not translate easily into a telephone conversation and that itemizing fees that vary by location may require numerous labels for the same service.

Procedural Status: The comment period closed January 2, 2026, and the reply-comment period closed February 2, 2026. The Commission adopted a final rule on July 22, 2026. The final rule permits conversational telephone summaries and aggregated presentation of location-dependent fees, eliminates the machine-readable-data requirement, and makes other changes. Most provisions take effect September 14, 2026.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Direct. The proposal identifies potential confusion from requiring representatives to recite a visual label verbatim over the telephone, where consumers cannot review the information at their own pace.

Relevance to Crowding Out: Supporting. The proposal treats detailed itemization of variable fees as a potential source of consumer confusion. This concern supports the premise of competition for finite attention, though the connection remains inferential.

• Federal Trade Commission. .com Disclosures: How to Make Effective Disclosures in Digital Advertising. FTC Staff Guidance. March 2013. https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/press-releases/ftc-staff-revises-online-advertising-disclosure-guidelines/130312dotcomdisclosures.pdf.

Approach: Non-peer-reviewed agency guidance and policy analysis.

Provisions/Holding: The Federal Trade Commission states that disclosures must remain clear and conspicuous across digital platforms, including mobile devices with limited screen space. Information needed to prevent deception should appear as close as possible to the claim it qualifies because scrolling increases the likelihood that consumers will miss it. The FTC also cautions that essential disclosures do not become effective merely because they appear in lengthy terms-of-use agreements. Such disclosures “should not be relegated to them.”

Procedural Status: FTC staff guidance rather than a binding regulation.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Direct. The guidance recognizes that burying important information in lengthy text prevents consumers from finding and understanding it.

Relevance to Crowding Out: Direct. The guidance explains how limited screen space and competing visual elements can reduce a disclosure’s prominence and divert consumers’ attention.

• Federal Trade Commission. “Trade Regulation Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees.” Final rule. Federal Register 90 (January 10, 2025): 2,066. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/01/10/2024-30293/trade-regulation-rule-on-unfair-or-deceptive-fees.

Approach: Primary legal authority from an agency rulemaking.

Provisions/Holding: Acting under 15 U.S.C. § 57a, the Federal Trade Commission declared it unfair and deceptive for live-event ticketing and short-term lodging businesses to advertise prices that omit mandatory fees. The rule requires businesses to display the total price more prominently than other pricing information, except the final payment amount. Before consumers consent to pay, businesses must disclose the nature, purpose, and amount of excluded charges, such as government and shipping fees. The Commission declined to require affirmative disclosure of each fee’s refundability because extensive qualifications could make such disclosures “impractical for businesses and confusing to consumers.”

Procedural Status: Final rule in effect since May 12, 2025.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Boundary condition. The Commission declined to require businesses to list the refundability conditions for every fee because extensive, itemized disclosures could confuse consumers and impede clear price communication.

Relevance to Crowding Out: None. The rule addresses the prominence and timing of total-price disclosures. The Commission rejected objections that upfront total-price disclosure would unduly constrain other price presentations, but it did not analyze attentional displacement among disclosures.

• Federal Trade Commission. “Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees in Online Food Delivery Services.” Advance notice of proposed rulemaking. Federal Register 91 (April 16, 2026): 20,381. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/04/16/2026-07473/rule-on-unfair-or-deceptive-fees-in-online-food-delivery-services.

Approach: Primary legal authority from an agency rulemaking.

Provisions/Holding: Acting under Section 18 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, the FTC requested comments on a potential rule addressing unfair or deceptive fees on online food-delivery platforms. The agency describes platforms advertising free or low-cost delivery before adding mandatory service, small-order, or other fees at checkout. Consumers may underestimate the total cost and decline to restart their search because of the “perceived futility of doing so.” The FTC asked whether a rule should require disclosure of the total price or mandatory fees earlier in the transaction.

Procedural Status: The comment period closed May 18, 2026. The proceeding remains at the advance-notice stage.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Context. The notice considers whether platforms should disclose variable fees upfront, which raises potential overload concerns. The document itself focuses on deception caused by drip pricing, rather than excessive disclosure.

Relevance to Crowding Out: None. The notice examines the timing of fee disclosures and deceptive pricing, rather than whether disclosures spatially displace other information.

• Fruits, Eric, and Jeffrey Westling. Comments of the International Center for Law & Economics: FCC CG Docket No. 22-2 and GN Docket No. 25-133. International Center for Law & Economics, January 2, 2026. https://laweconcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Broadband-Labels-Comments-2025.pdf.

Approach: Non-peer-reviewed policy analysis and commentary.

Findings: The authors support the Federal Communications Commission’s proposal to eliminate several broadband-label requirements. They cite behavioral research showing that excessive itemization imposes cognitive burdens and reduces consumer welfare. Requiring telephone representatives to read visual labels verbatim also creates a burdensome and confusing interaction. Post-sale labels in customer portals provide little value when they contain static, outdated information rather than current plan terms.

Authors’ Conclusions: Disclosures work only when they help consumers make decisions. Removing location-dependent fee itemization and verbatim telephone-reading requirements would improve the signal-to-noise ratio. Once disclosures exceed consumers’ processing capacity, “decision quality deteriorates, rather than improves.”

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Direct. Drawing on behavioral economics, the authors argue that disclosure volumes exceeding consumers’ cognitive capacity impair decision quality.

Relevance to Crowding Out: Direct. The authors argue that itemized lists of location-dependent fees create clutter that diverts attention from the total monthly price.

• Gabaix, Xavier. “Behavioral Inattention.” In Handbook of Behavioral Economics, vol. 2, edited by B. Douglas Bernheim, Stefano DellaVigna, and David Laibson, 261–343. Elsevier, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.hesbe.2018.11.001.

Approach: Peer-reviewed literature review and theoretical framework.

Findings: Across empirical studies, the mean attention parameter is 0.44, placing consumers roughly midway between full attention and complete inattention. The author develops a sparsity-based model in which people weigh the benefits of greater attention against its cognitive costs. They therefore systematically underweight or ignore variables they consider less important. This bounded rationality produces asymmetric Slutsky matrices and excess price volatility.

Authors’ Conclusions: Behavioral inattention is widespread and can be modeled tractably. People anchor on simplified default models and adjust only partially toward more accurate assessments. Incorporating limited attention into microeconomic theory can overturn standard results, including the symmetry of the Slutsky matrix and the efficiency of competitive equilibria.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Supporting. The framework explains why consumers cannot process every available piece of information and may disregard secondary attributes, causing additional disclosures to fail.

Relevance to Crowding Out: Context. The review examines how people allocate a finite attention budget among competing attributes. Applying that framework specifically to mandated disclosures requires extrapolation.

• Gabaix, Xavier, and David Laibson. “Shrouded Attributes, Consumer Myopia, and Information Suppression in Competitive Markets.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 121, no. 2 (2006): 505–540. https://doi.org/10.1162/qjec.2006.121.2.505.

Approach: Peer-reviewed theoretical model.

Findings: When the share of myopic consumers is sufficiently large, a “Shrouded Prices Equilibrium” can arise. Competitive firms conceal add-on prices, sell base products below marginal cost, and charge high markups for add-ons. Firms have no incentive to educate myopic consumers because informed consumers will buy the loss-leading base product and avoid the expensive add-ons. Debiasing consumers therefore makes them unprofitable customers.

Authors’ Conclusions: High add-on markups can persist even in highly competitive markets with costless advertising because of a “curse of debiasing.” Firms lose money by educating myopic consumers, so competition alone will not eliminate inefficient information shrouding.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Context. The model explains why consumers overlook hidden add-on costs. Applying that mechanism to overload caused by mandated disclosures requires extrapolation.

Relevance to Crowding Out: Context. The article examines firms’ incentives to suppress information and exploit limited attention. This relates to the supply of salient information but does not address the displacement of mandatory disclosures.

• Hancock, P. A., A. D. Kaplan, K. R. MacArthur, and J. L. Szalma. “How Effective Are Warnings? A Meta-Analysis.” Safety Science 130 (2020): 104876. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2020.104876.

Approach: Peer-reviewed meta-analysis.

Findings: The authors synthesized 272 effect sizes from 30 studies. Integrating a warning directly into a task substantially increased compliance. Warnings containing words also produced greater compliance than pictures alone. By contrast, “an increase in clutter on the warning induced a lower level of behavioral compliance.”

Authors’ Conclusions: Uncluttered warnings integrated into the task produce the highest compliance. Warnings should nevertheless serve as a last line of defense because their overall ability to change behavior remains limited.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Supporting. The finding that visual clutter reduces compliance directly supports the premise that excessive information impairs processing and decision-making.

Relevance to Crowding Out: Context. Integrating warnings into the primary task improves compliance, suggesting that competing information can reduce their effectiveness. Applying this finding specifically to competition for screen space requires extrapolation.

• Kielty, Patrick D., K. Philip Wang, and Diana L. Weng. “Simplifying Complex Disclosures: Evidence from Disclosure Regulation in the Mortgage Markets.” The Accounting Review 98, no. 4 (2023): 191–216. https://doi.org/10.2308/TAR-2021-0269.

Approach: Peer-reviewed difference-in-differences analysis using loan-level data.

Findings: The TILA-RESPA Integrated Disclosure (TRID) rule reduced mortgage-disclosure word counts by 65%. After its implementation, inexperienced first-time homebuyers obtained significantly lower interest rates relative to experienced repeat buyers. Higher points or upfront fees did not offset these savings, and the effect was strongest in areas with greater lender density. The simplified disclosures did not improve delinquency rates.

Authors’ Conclusions: Simplifying complex, duplicative disclosures lowers consumers’ processing costs, helping them comparison shop and avoid predatory lenders. By reducing information overload, “less disclosure makes borrowers better off.”

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Direct. The study provides empirical evidence that reducing the volume and complexity of mandated disclosures improves consumer understanding and financial outcomes.

Relevance to Crowding Out: None. The study measures the effects of reducing disclosure text but does not examine whether information spatially displaces competing content.

• Lacko, James M., and Janis K. Pappalardo. Improving Consumer Mortgage Disclosures: An Empirical Assessment of Current and Prototype Disclosure Forms. Bureau of Economics Staff Report. Federal Trade Commission, June 2007. https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/reports/improving-consumer-mortgage-disclosures-empirical-assessment-current-and-prototype-disclosure-forms/p025505mortgagedisclosurereport.pdf.

Approach: Non-peer-reviewed agency report based on 36 qualitative interviews and quantitative testing with more than 800 mortgage customers.

Findings: Existing Truth in Lending Act (TILA) and Good Faith Estimate (GFE) forms failed to communicate essential mortgage costs. About 20% of respondents could not correctly identify the annual percentage rate, cash due at closing, or monthly payment. The authors’ prototype forms “significantly improved consumer recognition of mortgage costs” among prime and subprime borrowers, with the largest gains for complex loans.

Authors’ Conclusions: Poorly designed disclosures confuse consumers and may cause them to stop processing the information altogether. Agencies should conduct extensive consumer testing to ensure that disclosures help consumers rather than hinder them.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Supporting. The report shows that confusing, voluminous disclosures can cause consumers to abandon information processing, consistent with overload theories.

Relevance to Crowding Out: None. The report evaluates form design and comprehension but does not examine competition among multiple disclosures for space or attention.

• Lacko, James M., and Janis K. Pappalardo. “The Failure and Promise of Mandated Consumer Mortgage Disclosures.” American Economic Review 100, no. 2 (2010): 516–521. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.100.2.516.

Approach: Peer-reviewed qualitative interviews and randomized controlled experiment.

Findings: In a controlled experiment with 819 borrowers, mandated mortgage forms failed to communicate key loan terms. Nearly “nine-tenths could not identify the total amount” of upfront charges. A prototype disclosure significantly improved comprehension of costs and terms, though consumers continued to struggle with highly complex loan structures.

Authors’ Conclusions: Mandated disclosures fail because of confusing, ineffective design, rather than inherent consumer irrationality or the unavoidable complexity of modern mortgages. Policymakers should consolidate duplicative forms into a single, well-tested document. This approach could strengthen consumer protection without limiting product availability.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Supporting. The study shows that dense, uncoordinated disclosure mandates confuse consumers and impair comprehension, though it attributes these effects primarily to poor design.

Relevance to Crowding Out: None. The experiment measures document comprehension, rather than competition for limited screen space or attention.

• Long, Michael W., Deirdre K. Tobias, Angie L. Cradock, Holly Batchelder, and Steven L. Gortmaker. “Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Impact of Restaurant Menu Calorie Labeling.” American Journal of Public Health 105, no. 5 (2015): e11–e24. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2015.302570.

Approach: Peer-reviewed systematic review and meta-analysis.

Findings: Across 19 studies, menu calorie labels were associated with an average reduction of 18.13 kilocalories ordered per meal. Among the six highest-quality controlled studies conducted in restaurants, the estimated reduction fell to a statistically insignificant 7.63 kilocalories. Daily-calorie reference statements produced mixed results. One study found an additional reduction of 38 kilocalories, while another found no effect.

Authors’ Conclusions: The evidence provides “minimal evidence to support menu calorie labeling as a strategy” for substantially reducing calories purchased in restaurants. Findings from laboratory and other nonrestaurant settings may overstate the effects of disclosure policies in real-world settings.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Counterevidence. The restaurant studies found a null effect, rather than evidence that calorie disclosures worsened choices. The labels may fail to improve decisions substantially, but they do not appear to degrade them.

Relevance to Crowding Out: None. The meta-analysis estimates the isolated effect of menu labels and does not examine whether competing disclosures displace information or attention.

• Nicoletti, Allison, and Christina Zhu. “Economic Consequences of Transparency Regulation: Evidence from Bank Mortgage Lending.” Journal of Accounting Research 61, no. 5 (2023): 1827–1871. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-679X.12498.

Approach: Peer-reviewed difference-in-differences analysis using administrative data.

Findings: After implementation of the TILA-RESPA Integrated Disclosure (TRID) rule, approval rates fell for covered closed-end loans relative to exempt open-end loans. The simplified disclosures appeared to facilitate comparison shopping because consumers were significantly more likely to withdraw covered applications or leave them incomplete. Covered loans also became less likely to sell on the secondary market.

Authors’ Conclusions: Simplified disclosures reduce consumers’ information-processing costs, improve comparison shopping, and constrain high bank fees. The same regulation imposes compliance costs and creates secondary-market frictions for banks, which can reduce credit availability.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Direct. The study shows that reducing the complexity and volume of mandated disclosures lowers processing costs and improves consumer decision-making.

Relevance to Crowding Out: None. The study examines the consumer and lender consequences of simplified disclosures, rather than spatial competition among disclosures.

• Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Enhancing Online Disclosure Effectiveness. OECD Digital Economy Papers, no. 335. Paris: OECD Publishing, 2022. https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2022/10/enhancing-online-disclosure-effectiveness_e8b230aa/6d7ea79c-en.pdf.

Approach: Non-peer-reviewed policy analysis and literature review by an intergovernmental organization.

Provisions/Holding: The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development advises policymakers to “limit the prescriptiveness and extensiveness” of mandated disclosures to the minimum necessary to avoid worsening information overload. The report identifies an accumulation problem in which individually defensible disclosure mandates become overwhelming when combined. Disclosures should remain clear, accessible, and conspicuous so consumers can use them effectively.

Procedural Status: Report of the OECD Committee on Consumer Policy.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Direct. The report identifies information overload as a major barrier that causes consumers to disregard online disclosures.

Relevance to Crowding Out: Direct. The report recognizes an accumulation problem in which concurrent disclosures compete for consumers’ finite time and attention.

• Persson, Petra. “Attention Manipulation and Information Overload.” Behavioural Public Policy 2, no. 1 (2018): 78–106. https://doi.org/10.1017/bpp.2017.10.

Approach: Peer-reviewed theoretical model.

Findings: In a model where experts compete for a decision-maker’s limited attention, lowering entry costs increases the number of experts. Beyond a certain point, the decision-maker tunes out and experiences lower expected utility. Under a mandatory disclosure rule, a single expert can strategically create “information overload” by adding irrelevant cues that conceal unfavorable required information. If regulators mandate a simple disclosure format, the expert may pursue “complexification” by disaggregating the product’s payoff structure until relevant information exceeds the consumer’s attention limit.

Authors’ Conclusions: Limited attention permits firms to manipulate consumers’ focus, making simple disclosure rules ineffective or counterproductive. Because format requirements may prompt firms to increase product complexity, policymakers may need to regulate product design directly.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Direct. The article models how excessive information, produced by either competition or strategic firm behavior, causes consumers to tune out and make worse decisions.

Relevance to Crowding Out: Direct. The model shows how irrelevant cues exhaust consumers’ limited attention and displace valuable mandated information.

• Rasch, Alexander, Miriam Thöne, and Tobias Wenzel. “Drip Pricing and Its Regulation: Experimental Evidence.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 176 (2020): 353–370. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2020.04.007.

Approach: Peer-reviewed theoretical analysis and laboratory experiment.

Findings: In simulated markets where comparing drip prices imposed a small search cost, sellers set drip prices near the permitted maximum and competed primarily on base prices. Relative to transparent pricing, drip pricing raised average total prices from 15.37 to 16.96, increased seller profits, and reduced buyer surplus. When the experiment randomized the maximum possible drip price, 21% of buyers mistakenly chose the more expensive option.

Authors’ Conclusions: Drip pricing discourages comparison shopping and harms consumers by causing them to underestimate final prices. Banning drip pricing promotes competition and increases consumer welfare.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Counterevidence. Requiring comprehensive upfront price disclosure improved decision-making, rather than impairing it.

Relevance to Crowding Out: None. The study examines sequential price disclosure and search costs, rather than concurrent competition among disclosures for space or attention.

• Robinson, Lisa A., W. Kip Viscusi, and Richard Zeckhauser. “Efficient Warnings, Not ‘Wolf or Puppy’ Warnings.” In The Future of Risk Management, edited by Howard Kunreuther, Robert J. Meyer, and Erwann O. Michel-Kerjan, 227–248. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. https://rzeckhauser.scholars.harvard.edu/resource/efficientwarningspdf.

Approach: Peer-reviewed book chapter combining policy analysis and economic theory.

Findings: Required trans-fat labels coincided with a 78% reduction in trans-fat consumption between 2003 and 2012, though producer reformulation drove much of the decline. In the authors’ analysis of California’s Proposition 65, 69% of consumers mistakenly associated the generic cancer warning on cereal with the much greater risks of cigarette smoking. An abundance of undifferentiated warnings may cause consumers to ignore them because they cannot “separate puppies from wolves from dragons.”

Authors’ Conclusions: Warning systems fail when they use the same “wolf or puppy” language for risks of vastly different severity. Policymakers should use benefit-cost analysis to distinguish serious hazards from minor ones and prevent consumers from becoming complacent about critical warnings.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Direct. The chapter explains how an excess of indiscriminate warnings impairs consumer judgment and promotes complacency.

Relevance to Crowding Out: Supporting. The authors argue that proliferating low-value warnings divert attention from serious hazards, displacing more valuable information.

• Rummo, Pasquale E., Tod Mijanovich, Erilia Wu, Lloyd Heng, Emil Hafeez, Marie A. Bragg, Simon A. Jones, Beth C. Weitzman, and Brian Elbel. “Menu Labeling and Calories Purchased in Restaurants in a US National Fast Food Chain.” JAMA Network Open 6, no. 12 (2023): e2346851. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.46851.

Approach: Peer-reviewed quasi-experimental cohort study using difference-in-differences analysis.

Findings: Using nine years of transaction data from 2,329 Taco Bell restaurants, the researchers found that menu calorie labels were associated with 24.7 fewer calories purchased per transaction relative to control locations. Consumers bought fewer items, particularly tacos, and the decline was greatest during breakfast. Outside California, labeling was associated with an increase of 25.2 calories per in-store transaction but a decrease in calories purchased through drive-through orders.

Authors’ Conclusions: Consumers respond to calorie information on menu boards, producing small but sustained reductions in calories purchased over two years. Regional differences in consumer attitudes and ordering settings, including in-store and drive-through purchases, shape responses to the disclosures.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Counterevidence. Mandatory numerical disclosures modestly reduced calories purchased, rather than impairing consumer decision-making.

Relevance to Crowding Out: None. The study analyzes transaction data but does not examine how disclosure layout or competition among disclosures affects attention.

• Sanchez, Christopher A., and James Z. Goolsbee. “Character Size and Reading to Remember from Small Displays.” Computers & Education 55, no. 3 (2010): 1056–1062. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ892494.

Approach: Peer-reviewed laboratory experiment.

Findings: Participants reading 12-point text on a small screen recalled substantially less information than those reading the same text on a full-size display. When the font shrank to 8 points, recall on the small screen matched recall on the full-size display. Larger characters required more scrolling and fragmented the text, reducing factual recall.

Authors’ Conclusions: Character size interacts with display size. On small screens, designers must balance legibility against the scrolling and fragmentation caused by larger text. More compact text can improve recall by keeping related information together.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Context. The study suggests that fragmentation and scrolling impair information processing on small screens. Connecting this effect to disclosure overload requires extrapolation.

Relevance to Crowding Out: None. The study examines text size, scrolling, and recall but does not test competition among multiple disclosures.

• Santana, Shelle, Steven K. Dallas, and Vicki G. Morwitz. “Consumer Reactions to Drip Pricing.” Marketing Science 39, no. 1 (2020): 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2019.1207.

Approach: Peer-reviewed laboratory and field experiments.

Findings: Consumers exposed to drip pricing for optional add-ons initially selected the lower-base-price option at a much higher rate than consumers who saw fees upfront, 54.5% compared with 11.7%. Even after seeing the total price and receiving an opportunity to restart their search, 24.5% of consumers in the drip-pricing group stayed with the more expensive option. Only 7.8% of the upfront-pricing group made the same mistake. Consumers exposed to drip pricing also reported significantly less satisfaction with their final choices.

Authors’ Conclusions: Drip pricing makes initial choices sticky. Consumers overestimate the time needed to restart their search and mistakenly assume that competitors charge the same fees. The use of stylized online tasks and inexperienced participants limits the findings’ generalizability to experienced consumers in real markets.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Counterevidence. Upfront disclosure of optional fees improved price comprehension and reduced costly mistakes.

Relevance to Crowding Out: Context. The study shows that late disclosures often fail to correct consumers’ initial choices. Applying this finding to attentional or spatial crowding requires extrapolation.

• Sims, Christopher A. “Implications of Rational Inattention.” Journal of Monetary Economics 50, no. 3 (2003): 665–690. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0304-3932(03)00029-1.

Approach: Peer-reviewed theoretical model.

Findings: Applying Shannon’s information theory, the author models decision-makers as processing information through a channel with finite capacity. Under this constraint, they respond to aggregate economic variables gradually and with delay, while their individual behavior contains high-frequency noise.

Authors’ Conclusions: Replacing the assumption of unconstrained optimization with limited information-processing capacity better explains macroeconomic fluctuations and sluggish adjustment. Treating attention as a finite resource provides a common explanation for departures from classical rational expectations.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Context. The model establishes a finite capacity for processing information. Applying that constraint specifically to comprehension of mandated disclosures requires extrapolation.

Relevance to Crowding Out: Context. The model imposes a strict limit on processing new information but does not examine how particular disclosures compete for that capacity.

• Stango, Victor, and Jonathan Zinman. “Limited and Varying Consumer Attention: Evidence from Shocks to the Salience of Bank Overdraft Fees.” The Review of Financial Studies 27, no. 4 (2014): 990–1030. https://doi.org/10.1093/rfs/hhu008.

Approach: Peer-reviewed natural experiment using survey data.

Findings: Among 7,448 bank-account panelists, answering a survey with overdraft-related questions reduced the probability of incurring an overdraft fee that month by 3.7 percentage points, from a baseline rate of 26%. Repeated surveys built a “stock” of attention. Each additional survey completed over two years reduced the probability of an overdraft by 1.7 percentage points. Panelists avoided overdrafts primarily by making fewer debit-card and automatic-debit transactions, rather than by maintaining higher balances.

Authors’ Conclusions: Consumers possess a “limited, time-varying, associative, and malleable stock of attention” concerning household finance. Even uninformative prompts can focus attention and improve financial decisions, especially among consumers with less education and lower financial literacy.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Counterevidence. Making fee information more salient, even indirectly through surveys, reduced costly mistakes. The finding undercuts the claim that additional information necessarily impairs decision-making.

Relevance to Crowding Out: None. The study measures how attention prompts affect behavior but does not examine competition for limited screen space or displacement among disclosures.

• S. Department of Transportation. “Enhancing Transparency of Airline Ancillary Service Fees.” Final rule. Federal Register 89 (April 30, 2024): 34,620. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/04/30/2024-08609/enhancing-transparency-of-airline-ancillary-service-fees.

Approach: Primary legal authority from an agency rulemaking.

Provisions/Holding: Acting under 49 U.S.C. § 41712, the U.S. Department of Transportation required air carriers and ticket agents to disclose passenger-specific fees for checked bags, carry-on bags, and ticket changes or cancellations on the first page displaying fare and schedule information. The Department found that delayed fee disclosure causes substantial consumer injury. It permitted pop-ups, expandable text, and similar formats to avoid “overcrowd[ing] web pages.”

Procedural Status: The rule carried an effective date of July 1, 2024, but the 5th Circuit stayed it on July 29, 2024. The court vacated the rule on February 3, 2026, because the Department failed to provide an opportunity for public comment on a study used in the rulemaking. On July 2, 2026, the Department formally restored the disclosure rules that preceded the 2024 rule.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Boundary condition. The Department permitted flexible disclosure methods because rigid textual requirements could overcrowd webpages and make information harder to use.

Relevance to Crowding Out: Direct. The rule expressly addressed screen clutter and the displacement of flight options on space-constrained mobile displays.

• S. Department of Transportation. “Enhancing Transparency of Airline Ancillary Service Fees.” Final rule. Federal Register 91 (July 2, 2026): 40,368. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/full_text/html/2026/07/02/2026-13450.html.

Approach: Primary legal authority from an agency rulemaking.

Provisions/Holding: The rule implements the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ vacatur of the Department’s 2024 ancillary-fee rule. The court found that the Department violated the Administrative Procedure Act by relying on a study without allowing public comment on it. The 2026 rule removes the requirement to display critical ancillary fees at the first point in an itinerary search, “reinstating the rules previously in force.” Under the restored 2011 framework, airlines and ticket agents must notify consumers on the first screen displaying a fare that baggage fees may apply and explain where consumers can find those fees. Airlines must also list ancillary fees in a central location on their websites.

Procedural Status: Final rule effective July 2, 2026, under 49 U.S.C. §§ 40113 and 41712.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Context. Restoring the 2011 framework reduces the information displayed during initial searches. Any reduction in cognitive burden is incidental because the rule implements a judicial vacatur based on procedural defects, rather than behavioral findings.

Relevance to Crowding Out: None. The Department issued the rule to implement the court’s procedural ruling and did not evaluate spatial or attentional competition among disclosures.

• Utz, Christine, Martin Degeling, Sascha Fahl, Florian Schaub, and Thorsten Holz. “(Un)informed Consent: Studying GDPR Consent Notices in the Field.” In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 973–990. New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1145/3319535.3354212.

Approach: Peer-reviewed, large-scale field experiments and online survey.

Findings: In field experiments involving more than 80,000 website visitors, a neutral binary notice offering accept-or-decline options produced significantly more active responses than complex vendor lists. When category or vendor options were not selected by default, fewer than 0.2% of users actively accepted all tracking. Banner placement also mattered. Bottom-left banners generated the most interaction, while users often ignored top-bar banners.

Authors’ Conclusions: Consent-notice design strongly affects whether users make an active choice or accept tracking because of fatigue or defaults. Opt-out banners are “unlikely to produce intentional/meaningful consent expression,” supporting a shift toward privacy by default.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Boundary condition. Complex vendor lists reduced engagement relative to a simple binary choice, showing how excessive detail can discourage active decision-making.

Relevance to Crowding Out: Context. Banner placement affected engagement, and banners occupied space that otherwise displayed website content. Applying these findings to broader theories of spatial crowding requires extrapolation.

• Vance, Anthony, Jeffrey L. Jenkins, Bonnie Brinton Anderson, Daniel K. Bjornn, and C. Brock Kirwan. “Tuning Out Security Warnings: A Longitudinal Examination of Habituation Through fMRI, Eye Tracking, and Field Experiments.” MIS Quarterly 42, no. 2 (2018): 355–380. https://doi.org/10.25300/MISQ/2018/14124.

Approach: Peer-reviewed laboratory studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and eye tracking, combined with a field experiment.

Findings: During a three-week field experiment with 102 participants, adherence to repeated mobile-security warnings fell from 87% to 64%. Participants who saw polymorphic warnings, which changed appearance over time, rejected risky apps more accurately than those who saw static warnings, 76% compared with 55%. The fMRI results also showed declining responses in the right and left insula over successive days.

Authors’ Conclusions: Habituation is a neurobiological response marked by a “decreased response to repeated stimulation.” Repeated static warnings lose effectiveness as users unconsciously tune them out. Polymorphic warnings can sustain attention and improve adherence by changing their visual appearance.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Supporting. The study shows that repeated warnings produce habituation and progressively reduce attention and decision quality. Extending this finding to disclosure overload requires treating repetition as a source of overload.

Relevance to Crowding Out: None. The study measures habituation to warnings over time, rather than concurrent spatial displacement on a screen.

• Verrill, Linda, Fanfan Wu, David Weingaertner, Taiye Oladipo, Lisa Lubin, Roshni Devchand, Laura Koehler, Lauren Prowse, Caroline P. Martin, and Thea Zimmerman. Front of Package Labeling Literature Review. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, April 2023. https://www.fda.gov/media/175617/download?attachment.

Approach: Non-peer-reviewed agency report and systematic literature review.

Findings: Consumers generally prefer simple front-of-package (FOP) labels, and summary systems are often easier to understand than nutrient-specific formats such as Guideline Daily Amounts. Warning labels attract attention, require less processing time, and may discourage unhealthy purchases. The evidence on actual purchasing, diets, and health outcomes remains mixed. Some studies also found that warning labels can mitigate health halos created by nutrient-content marketing claims.

Authors’ Conclusions: Simple summary symbols and interpretive labels can help consumers identify healthier foods. Government endorsement may increase confidence in these labels. The report stresses that more research is needed to determine whether FOP labels produce healthier diets and better health outcomes.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Supporting. The review finds that consumers generally understand simplified summary labels more easily than detailed numerical formats. This supports overload theory, though the report does not expressly attribute the difference to information overload.

Relevance to Crowding Out: Context. The review discusses interactions among FOP labels, other package marketing, and time pressure. Applying those findings to spatial or attentional crowding requires extrapolation.

• Wang, Jialan, and Kathleen Burke. “The Effects of Disclosure and Enforcement on Payday Lending in Texas.” Journal of Financial Economics 145, no. 2 (2022): 489–507. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2021.09.024.

Approach: Peer-reviewed difference-in-differences analysis and event study.

Findings: A Texas mandate requiring behaviorally informed disclosures before each payday loan produced a persistent 12% decline in loan volume during its first six months. The decline occurred entirely through fewer loans, rather than smaller loan amounts. The researchers found no offsetting increase in prices, delinquencies, or defaults.

Authors’ Conclusions: Behaviorally designed disclosures can substantially affect equilibrium loan quantities and lender revenue, even for simple financial products. The targeted disclosures discouraged consumers from beginning new sequences of costly debt.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: Counterevidence. An additional mandated disclosure reduced payday borrowing without evidence that it overwhelmed consumers, undercutting the claim that added disclosure necessarily impairs decision-making.

Relevance to Crowding Out: None. The study examines the effects of a physical disclosure sheet but does not measure competition for screen space or consumer attention.

• Weyl, E. Glen, and Michal Fabinger. “Pass-Through as an Economic Tool: Principles of Incidence Under Imperfect Competition.” Journal of Political Economy 121, no. 3 (2013): 528–583. https://doi.org/10.1086/670401.

Approach: Peer-reviewed theoretical economic modeling.

Findings: The authors extend standard tax-incidence principles to imperfectly competitive markets. Pass-through rates depend on the curvature of demand as well as the relative elasticities of supply and demand. Under monopoly, consumers and producers together bear more than the amount of the tax because the tax further reduces an already inefficiently low quantity. In symmetric imperfect competition, firms bear more of the tax relative to consumers as pricing conduct becomes less competitive, assuming a fixed pass-through rate.

Authors’ Conclusions: Tax incidence and pass-through provide a common framework for analyzing welfare and comparative statics across imperfectly competitive markets, connecting industrial organization with public finance. A principal limitation is the model’s partial-equilibrium assumption that outside alternatives are supplied competitively with no markups.

Relevance to Disclosure Overload: None. The article models tax incidence, cost pass-through, and market competition without addressing disclosure mandates, consumer comprehension, or cognitive limits.

Relevance to Crowding Out: None. The model does not examine finite attention, interface constraints, or the displacement of competing information.

[1] Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees in Online Food Delivery Services, 91 Fed. Reg. 20,381 (Apr. 16, 2026) (advance notice of proposed rulemaking) [hereinafter ANPRM].