

The Power of Comparison: How It Affects Decision Making - bankerofpawns
http://uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2011/01/the-power-of-comparison-how-it-affects-decision-making.php

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rst
Restaurant menus are often built around these kinds of comparison effects;
it's pretty common, for instance, to have a really expensive item on the menu
in order to make the _second_ most expensive thing look reasonably priced in
comparison (that being the high-margin entree they really want people to
order). A couple of examples, from a pricey New York restaurant and from a
chain:

Balthazar's (French brasserie in NYC):
<http://nymag.com/restaurants/features/62498/>

CPK: [http://www.walletpop.com/2010/01/15/secret-restaurant-
menu-t...](http://www.walletpop.com/2010/01/15/secret-restaurant-menu-tricks-
dissecting-california-pizza-kitch/)

More on this sort of thing (a _lot_ more) can be found in, e.g., Predictably
Irrational by Dan Ariely (highly recommended)...

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lotusleaf1987
IIRC that's called a decoy strategy. You put the decoy there to make the other
choices look better by comparison. It gives you justification for making the
choice and forces their decision. I read this book in college:
[http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-
Busine...](http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Business-
Essentials/dp/product-description/006124189X) It goes through a bunch of
different tactics used in marketing/advertising/sales such as foot in the
door, door in the face, etc etc. Once I read it, it really gave me a new
perspective on how often people are trying to manipulate our choices.

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ricaurte
I remember seeing a previous article on HN talking about how you should have 3
products to sell instead of 1, because it helps to anchor the customer when
they make a decision. That makes a lot of sense when you consider the study
shown in the article about how people valued two books in isolation and then
relative to each other.

One thing to possibly take away is that if you have a more "featureful"
product (like the 20,000 entries v 10,000 entries) that's not as nice, people
will be willing to pay more for it, if it is next to a nicer "less featureful"
product. Obviously, this might only work in limited domains, like the
dictionary example, but food for thought if you're selling your own product or
one on eBay. And whether people would actually end up buying the 20,000 word
dictionary instead of the 10,000 word dictionary is another question entirely.

~~~
lotusleaf1987
That's because it's difficult to evaluate anything in an absolute way. You
make decisions relative to each other, based on the information you have at
the time. In your example, of selling three products, they usually price the
middle product higher to make the third option more attractive by comparison
and without the middle product people are more likely to go with the cheaper
option. The middle option is the decoy. They don't expect anyone to buy it and
they don't really want anyone to, it's just there to give the buyer a reason
to make the choice.

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anirudh
This and many of such psychological effects are described brilliantly in Dan
Ariely's book Predictably Irrational. Amazon link :
[http://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised-
Expande...](http://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised-Expanded-
ebook/dp/B002C949KE/ref=dp_kinw_strp_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2)

He also talks about all the experiments he did to support such claims.

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JoachimSchipper
Did anyone else try to estimate the number of pages in the dictionary? (I'm
genuinely curious!)

