Theories of Context Effects in Multi-alternative, Multi-attribute Choice

Abstract

Over the past several decades, researchers in psychology, neuroscience, marketing, and economics have been keen to understand context effects in multi-alternative, multi-attribute decision-making. These effects occur when choices among existing alternatives are altered by the addition of a new alternative to the choice set. The effects violate classic decision theories and have led to the development of computational and mathematical models that explain how the effects arise due to underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms. This paper reviews the class of dynamic models of these effects, comparing mechanisms across models. We observe that most models of context effects incorporate an attention mechanism, suggesting attention plays an important role in multi-alternative, multi-attribute decision-making. We conclude by discussing recent empirical studies of attention and context effects and hypothesize that changes in attention could be responsible for recently observed reversals in context effects.