ERIC Number: EJ1481608
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2025-Dec
Pages: 9
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: EISSN-2056-7936
Available Date: 2025-08-22
How Decoy Options Ferment Choice Biases in Real-World Consumer Decision-Making
Sean Devine1; James Goulding2; John Harvey2; Anya Skatova3; A. Ross Otto1
npj Science of Learning, v10 Article 60 2025
The decoy effect describes a bias in which people's choices between two valuable options are swayed by a third, inferior, "decoy" option. Despite being documented in lab settings, relatively little work has investigated whether decoy effects occur "in the wild" where consumers face large, diverse choice sets. We employ a new methodology to examine the impact of decoy options on purchase decisions using a dataset of 3.6 million UK grocery-store wine transactions. Results indicate that when comparing wines that vary in quality and price across contexts, the presence of dominated (i.e., inferior) decoy options increased consumers' likelihood of choosing a target option--a hallmark of the well-documented attraction effect. The strength of these effects was modest overall (roughly 1% change in preference) and, interestingly, depended on consumers' idiosyncratic histories of experience. Our study provides a proof of principle demonstrating that these sorts of context effects are detectable in richer, complex real-world consumer choice settings.
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: United Kingdom
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: 1McGill University, Department of Psychology, Montreal, Canada; 2Nottingham University Business School, N/LAB, Nottingham, UK; 3University of Bristol, Digital Footprints Lab & Medical Research Council Integrative Epidemiology Unit at the University of Bristol, Population Health Science, Bristol Medical School, Bristol, UK

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