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Abstract Context effects occur when the preference between two alternatives is affected by the presence of an extra alternative. These effects are some of the most well studied phenomena in multi-alternative, multi-attribute decision making. Recent research in this area has revealed an intriguing pattern of results. On the one hand, these effects are robust and ubiquitous. That is, they have been demonstrated in many domains and different choice settings. On the other hand, they are fragile and they disappear or even reverse under different conditions. This pattern of results has spurred debate and speculation about the cognitive mechanisms that drive these choices. The attraction effect, where the preference for an option increases in the presence of a dominated decoy, has generated the most controversy. In this registered report, we systematically vary factors that are known to be associated with the attraction effect to build a solid foundation of empirical results to aid future theory development. We find a robust attraction effect across the different conditions. The strength of this effect is modulated by the display order (e.g., decoy top, target middle, competitor bottom) and mode (numeric vs. graphical) but not display layout (by-attribute vs. by-alternative).
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Reconciling the Paradoxical Findings of Choice Overload Through an Analytical Lens
Too much of a good thing can be harmful. Choice overload, a compelling paradox in consumer psychology, exemplifies this notion with the idea that offering more product options could impede rather than improve consumer satisfaction, even when consumers are free to ignore any available option. After attracting intense interest in the past decades from multiple disciplines, research on choice overload has produced voluminous yet paradoxical findings that are widely perceived as inconsistent even at the meta-analytic level. This paper launches an interdisciplinary inquiry to resolve the inconsistencies on both the conceptual and empirical fronts. Specifically, we identified a surprising butrobust pattern among the existing empirical evidence for the choiceoverload effect and demonstrated through mathematical analysis and extensive simulation studies that the pattern would only likely emerge from one specific type of latent mechanism underlying the moderated choiceoverload effect. The paper discusses the research and practical implications of our findings—namely, the broad promise of analytical meta-analysis (an emerging area for the use of data analytics) and machine learning to address the widely recognized inconsistencies in social and behavioral sciences, and the unique and salient role of the information systems community in developing this new era of meta-analysis.
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- PAR ID:
- 10481276
- Publisher / Repository:
- MISQ
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- MIS Quarterly
- Volume:
- 45
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 0276-7783
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1893 to 1920
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.25300/MISQ/2021/16954
