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Multi-Alternative Decision Making

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Introduction Some economists assume that people make a choice according to the principle of value maximisation and the ordering of the options is independent of the context. However, there are anomalies of decision making suggesting that the context matters. The three basic anomalies are the similarity effect (Tversky, 1972), the attraction effect (Huber, Payne and Puto, 1982) and the compromise effect (Simonson, 1989). Theorists have tried explaining these effects by various approaches. For example, the multi-alternative decision field theory (Roe, Busemeyer and Townsend, 2001) can explain all the three effects. In addition, Tversky (1972) applied the elimination by aspects model to illustrate the similarity effect and Tversky and Simonson (1993) introduced a componential context model to explain the attraction and compromise effects. The next section reviews the three anomalies of multi-alternative decision making. Then we illustrate how the three theories mentioned above explain the anomalies. After that, the decision field theory is compared with the other two models respectively. Three context effects in decision making In real life, we may make choices among various options with a large number of attributes. For simplicity, we use five options with only two attributes to demonstrate the three anomalies as Figure 1 shows. Figure 1 Figure 1 - An example of the problem of choosing among options according to two attributes, which are represented by the

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