Testing the Effect of Time Pressure on Asymmetric Dominance and Compromise Decoys in Choice

Dynamic, connectionist models of decision making, such as decision field theory (Roe, Busemeyer, & Townsend, 2001), propose that the effect of context on choice arises from a series of pairwise comparisons between attributes of alternatives across time. As such, they predict that limiting the amount of time to make a decision should decrease rather than increase the size of contextual effects. This prediction was tested across four levels of time pressure on both the asymmetric dominance (Huber, Payne, & Puto, 1982) and compromise (Simonson, 1989) decoy effects in choice. Overall, results supported this prediction, with both types of decoy effects found to be larger as time pressure decreased.