Itamar Simonson

Who they are

Simonson studies how consumers make choices when they are unsure what they want, and how the set of options on offer shapes the choice. The two papers this site draws on are his 1989 paper on reason-based choice and his 1992 paper with Tversky in the Journal of Marketing Research.

This page records only what the papers and their published records state. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.

Key papers

Choice based on reasons: the case of attraction and compromise effects (1989). Simonson proposed that people who are uncertain about their preferences choose the option supported by the best reasons. In the main study, 372 students at three universities chose among televisions, apartments, calculators, mouthwash and other products, in sets arranged so that the same brand sometimes sat at an extreme and sometimes in the middle. In nine of eleven tests, a brand took a significantly larger share once it became the compromise. The abstract reports that attraction and compromise effects tended to be stronger among people who expected to justify their decisions to others.

Choice in context: tradeoff contrast and extremeness aversion (1992), with Amos Tversky. The paper proposed two hypotheses about how context shapes choice. Its camera study offered one group a Minolta X-370 at $169.99 and a Maxxum 3000i at $239.99, and they split evenly. A second group also saw a Maxxum 7000i at $469.99, and 57 per cent of them chose the 3000i.

Key ideas

The central idea is that preferences are formed in context. An option's appeal depends on what sits beside it, and a choice that is easy to defend is attractive when people are uncertain. Simonson's 1989 paper found that students saw a compromise choice as safer, though not as easier to justify.

The idea has held up across many later studies. A 2016 meta-analysis of 142 experimental observations by Nico Neumann and colleagues found middle options chosen significantly more often, with large variation in size across study designs.

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