Christopher Puto

Who they are

Christopher Puto earned a doctorate at Duke University, which a 2003 University of St. Thomas profile in B Magazine described as the school's first PhD in business administration. The same profile says he was a senior marketing and sales executive at Burger King before academia, then a marketing professor at the University of Michigan, MBA program director at the University of Arizona, and dean of the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. By 2003 he was dean of the College of Business at the University of St. Thomas, which launched its first full-time MBA that year. A Twin Cities Business report in February 2012 said he would step down as dean. The profile says his research into decision making began during his doctoral studies.

Key papers

Huber, J., Payne, J. W., & Puto, C. (1982). Adding asymmetrically dominated alternatives: violations of regularity and the similarity hypothesis. Journal of Consumer Research, 9(1), 90-98.

Huber, J., Payne, J. W., & Puto, C. P. (2014). Let's be honest about the attraction effect. Journal of Marketing Research, 51(4), 520-525.

Key ideas

Adding an asymmetrically dominated alternative to a choice set can increase the probability of choosing the item that dominates it.

The 1982 result points to the inadequacy of many current choice models.

In 2014 he and his co-authors answered the critics of the effect in the same issue of the Journal of Marketing Research.

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