Context-dependent selection: The effects of decoy and phantom job candidates

The attraction effect has historically referred to a situation in which an inferior alternative (i.e., a decoy) influences the relative attractiveness of other alternatives in a choice set. This investigation was aimed at examining attraction effects in a simulated employee-selection context, and testing alternative hypotheses for the source of attraction effects. Experiment 1 investigated decoys along with superior, but unavailable, (i.e., phantom) alternatives in an employee-selection scenario. Results showed no target by alternative-type interaction, suggesting that decoys and phantoms operate similarly in affecting selection. This finding favors context-dependent weighting and loss-aversion explanations for attraction effects. Experiment 2 showed that decoy effects are robust to a predetermined-weighting manipulation. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.