Decoy Effects in Financial Service E-Sales Systems

Users of E-Sales platforms typically face the problem of choosing the most suitable product or service from large and potentially complex assortments. Whereas the problem of finding and presenting suitable items fulfilling the user’s requirements can be tackled by providing additional support in the form of recommenderand configuration systems, the control of psychological side e↵ects resulting from irrationalities of human decision making has been widely ignored so far. Decoy e↵ects are one family of biases which have been shown to be relevant in this context. The asymmetric dominance e↵ect and the compromise e↵ect have been shown to be among the most stable decoy e↵ects and therefore also carry big potential for biasing online decision taking. This paper presents two user studies investigating the impacts of the asymmetric dominance and compromise e↵ect in the financial services domain. While the first study uses synthesized items for triggering a decoy e↵ect, the second study uses real products found on konsument.at, which is an Austrian consumer advisory site. Whereas the results of the first study prove the potential influence of decoy e↵ects on online decision making in the financial services domain, the results of the second study provide clear evidence of the practical relevance for real online decision supportand E-sales systems.