Asymmetric Dominance: Generalizations and Lessons

Joel Huber-Duke University

An example from the marketplace

What instigated the initial study?

• Duncan Luce argued that only regularity had not been violated

• Regularity specifies that you cannot increase the probability of choosing an item by adding an item to the set

• John Payne, Chris Puto and I then designed a task that combined many known context effects to violate regularity

• We did not know whether it would work; in hindsight, it was a low probability experiment

Example of Asymmetric Dominance Effect

Ambience

Food Quality

+ (Q=***, A=****) 50% Shr

+ (Q=****, A=***) 50% Shr

For a big dinner you are indifferent between these two restaurants

Example of Asymmetric Dominance Effect

Ambience

Food Quality

+ (Q=***, A=****)

+ (Q=****, A=***)

What happens if we add a restaurant with great ambience but lower quality?

+ (Q=**, A=****)

2% Shr 60% Shr

38% Shr

How robust is the effect?

• Birds do it, bees do it

• Consumers in markets choosing beans do it

• Works with real gambles

• Works with complex stimuli

• Attributes do not have to be common, or even continuous, only ordered

What makes the asymmetric dominance effect stronger?

• Accountability, need to justify

• Less processing capacity or time pressure

• Greater attribute knowledge

• Presence of a no-choice option

• Choices over ratings

What makes it go away?

• Repeated choices within a category– Does not happen in choice based conjoint– Asymmetric dominance requires current

construction of preferences

• Lack of transparency in the dominance relationship– Preference ambiguity within attributes– Difficulty realizing one alternative is dominant

General theoretical approaches

• Attribute importance (weight shift)– Market inference – Range-importance effect

• Position of alternatives change (perceptual shift)– Anchoring on the dominated alternative– Range-frequency mechanism

• Utility from dominance (value shift)– Conscious-articulate– Automatic-inarticulate

Example of Asymmetric Dominance Effect

Ambience

Food Quality

+ (Q=***, A=****)

+ (Q=****, A=***)

What happens if we add a restaurant with great ambience but lower quality?

+ (Q=**, A=****)

2% Shr 60% Shr

38% Shr

General theoretical results

• Most hypothesized effects matter, but differ in their magnitude and generality

• Attribute weight effects are hardest to derive and prove (little carryover)

• Perceptual effects matter, mostly when perceptual judgments (ratings) are evoked

• For choice, direct short-term, automatic utility from dominance appears to be the most important process

Remaining theoretical questions

• Impact differs by attribute used—high priced decoys are far more effective than low priced ones

• Detailed processing account—what happens to search after discovering a dominance relationship

• Unified response surface model--integrating dominated, compromise and phantom effects.

Asymmetric dominance–more than a quarter century old!

• Asymmetric dominance has come of age as a classic context effect, like loss aversion and framing

• Now assumed, used as a manipulation to bring about preference for an item

• Schemer-schema: How much do people use ASD to affect other’s choices? What is their reaction to such manipulation?

Why asymmetric dominance spawned so much research

• Effect is robust and general, but perplexing• Easy to conceptualize—two dimensions, decoy,

target, competitor provide a good story • Easy to run, multiple categories, quick choices• Open-ended conceptually: Expands into

different tasks, compromise and phantom alternatives

• Open-ended theoretically. It can be used to validate many different theories

Final Lessons

• Conduct research in areas where the surprise coefficient is large– Simple story, clear characters– Domain not explored– Relevant to markets

• Do not try to resolve all the issues…leave room for other questions and researchers

• Be alert for anomalies, public challenges, and emperors lacking clothes!