How decoy options ferment choice biases in real-world consumer decision-making
Abstract 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, d...
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| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Nature Portfolio
2025-08-01
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| Series: | npj Science of Learning |
| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-025-00341-2 |
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| Summary: | Abstract 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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| ISSN: | 2056-7936 |