Differences Attract: An Experimental Study of Focusing in Economic Choice
Ola Andersson,
Jim Ingebretsen Carlson and
Erik Wengström
No 2016:15, Working Papers from Lund University, Department of Economics
Abstract:
Several recent models of choice build on the idea that decision makers are more likely to choose an option if its attributes stand out compared to the attributes of the available alternatives. One example is the model of focusing by Köszegi and Szeidl (2013) where decision makers focus disproportionally on the attributes in which the available options differ more, implying that some attributes will be overweighted. We test this prediction in a controlled experiment. We find that subjects are more likely to make inconsistent choices when we manipulate the choice set by adding new options that are unchosen, but affect the maximal difference in attributes among the options. Hence, our results suggest that there exists a focusing effect.
Keywords: Individual decision making; focus; attention; salience; decoy; experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D03 D12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 69 pages
Date: 2016-06-30
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-ger
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)
Downloads: (external link)
https://lucris.lub.lu.se/ws/portalfiles/portal/194593700/WP16_15 Full text (application/pdf)
Related works:
Journal Article: Differences Attract: An Experimental Study of Focusing in Economic Choice (2021) 
Working Paper: Differences Attract: An Experimental Study of Focusing in Economic Choice (2016) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:lunewp:2016_015
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Working Papers from Lund University, Department of Economics School of Economics and Management, Box 7080, S-22007 Lund, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Iker Arregui Alegria ().