This chapter presents a literature review on the relevant themes of this thesis, which are digital products, mass customization and variety. The reviewed literature is used to analyze these themes and works towards the hypotheses on the relationships between customization, variety, complexity and search costs. Each theme is first clearly defined, followed by an overview of existing literature and is then narrowed down towards the research hypotheses. Also the characteristics of the main themes are identified in order to operationalize them for the empirical research.
Section 2.1 starts with a review of the existing literature on digital products and their characteristic features, which distinguish them from physical products. That theme is followed by section 2.2 on customization. The chapter continues with a literature review on variety in section 2.3, which is strongly related to mass customization. The chapter ends with the research hypotheses.
