Consumer Decision‑Making Under Decoys: How Price, Quantity, and Quality Shape the Attraction Effect
Christian Min
09/09/2026
This paper examines how different decoy attributes influence consumer behaviour among three different car options. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions: A control condition with no decoy and three experimental conditions with a decoy. This decoy is an inferior option that was added in order to manipulate how consumers view the price, quantity, or quality of a target and a competitor good with the goal of shifting consumer preference towards this target good (in the case of this study, Car B). Across all conditions, the presence of a decoy significantly increased consumer preference towards the target option, which demonstrated the robustness of the attraction effect. My study also found that the Quantity Decoy created the strongest shift in preference, followed by the Price Decoy and then the Quality Decoy. These findings suggest that consumers rely much more heavily on numerical and more objective attributes when comparing goods such as price or quantity, as opposed to more subjective and qualitative attributes such as quality. My study also demonstrates how education level does not meaningfully impact the power of the attraction effect. This asserts that the attraction effect reflects general cognitive processes in the brain rather than demographic differences. Overall, my findings support already established theories like the idea of asymmetric dominance, heuristic processing, and context-dependent decision making. Additionally, this paper discusses consumer behavior and how firms can design their choice environment.