Improving Preference Assessment: Limiting the Effect of Context Through Pre-exposure to Attribute Levels

Jay Russo for helpful comments. This paper has benefited from comments by Detlof von Winterfeldt, Departmental Editor, and three anonymous referees. 3 This article introduces a technique for improving preference assessment by reducing the influence of context on preferential choices. We propose that a decision maker who is exposed to relevant attribute levels will form spontaneous valuations, which will then insulate the decision maker from the effects of context during subsequent preference assessment. Results from three studies support this hypothesis. Pre-exposure to product attribute levels undermined the impact of attribute priming, decision framing, and asymmetric dominance on preferential choices. A fourth study demonstrates that similar results can be obtained by allowing decision makers to pre-generate lists of attribute levels on their own.