Do we make better decisions on the Internet?

This paper focuses on whether there are differences in decision performance between decisions made online on a laptop versus offline on paper. Decision performance was measured by decision speed and decision quality. The latter was defined as rationality measured by first-order stochastic dominance (FOSD). The fewer violations of FOSD, the more rational the decision and the higher the decision quality. I conducted an experiment with two treatment groups, online and offline, consisting of students from the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany (GUF). In both treatments, subjects filled in a survey including questions on demographics, area of study, choice tasks on FOSD, follow-up questions on attitude towards the medium and previous knowledge of FOSD. The results showed that there are no significant differences between media both with regard to speed and rationality. The relations between rationality and area of study and between rationality and previous knowledge of FOSD are significant. Moreover, the relations between speed and gender and between speed and medium familiarity when writing were significant. To summarize, there is not enough evidence to conclude that the medium itself has an impact on rationality or speed. Therefore, researchers and practitioners can rather focus on confounding factors like self-selection bias when moving services and surveys online.