  Decision making is the cognitive process of selecting a course of action
among multiple alternatives. As the decision maker belongs to a complex
microenvironment (which contains multiple decision makers), has to make a
decision where multiple options are present which often leads to a phenomenon
known as the "paradox of choices". The latter refers to the case where too many
options can lead to negative outcomes, such as increased uncertainty, decision
paralysis, and frustration. Here, we employ an entropy driven mechanism within
a statistical physics framework to explain the premises of the paradox. In
turn, we focus on the emergence of a collective "paradox of choice", in the
case of interacting decision-making agents, quantified as the decision
synchronization time. Our findings reveal a trade-off between synchronization
time and the sensing radius, indicating the optimal conditions for information
transfer among group members, which significantly depends the individual
sensitivity parameters. Interestingly, when agents sense their microenvironment
in a biased way or their decisions are influenced by their past choices, then
the collective "paradox of choice" does not occur. In a nutshell, our theory
offers a low-dimensional and unified statistical explanation of the "paradox of
choice" at the individual and at the collective level.
