Revisiting the decoy effect: replication and extension of Ariely and Wallsten (1995) and Connolly, Reb, and Kausel (2013)

Abstract

The decoy effect refers to the phenomenon whereby an inferior, unpreferable option reverses people’s preferences and increases the choice share of a targeted option. In two pre-registered experiments with an Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) sample (N after exclusion = 1,001), we attempted to replicate two experiments from the decoy effect literature. We failed to replicate the original results in Study 1. The observed effects were not in the predicted direction, and their sizes were trivial. We replicated the decoy effect in Study 2, yet with a much smaller effect size than in the original. In addition, we concluded inconclusive evidence for the central hypothesis of the original study that regret salience weakens the decoy effect. We found some indication for a weak reduction, yet our sample size did not provide adequate power to detect this difference. Extending the replication in Study 2, we tested whether making salient the low reversibility of decisions can have a similar impact as regret salience. We again found indication for an effect in the predicted direction, yet the effect was too weak to be detected given our sample size. We discuss potential reasons for the discrepancies between the original and the replication results, as well as the implications. All materials, data, and analysis codes are available at https://osf.io/vsbzk.

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