Improving Preference Assessment: Limiting the Effect of Context through Pre-Exposure to Attribute Levels Author(s):

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. This paper 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 supported 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 demonstrated that similar results can be obtained by allowing decision makers to pregenerate lists of attribute levels on their own.