Joel Huber
Consumer researcher who established the decoy effect and, in the same paper, named its commercial use.
Who they are
Huber works at Duke on choice and measurement. The 1982 paper with John Payne and Christopher Puto is among the most cited findings in consumer research, and it began as an observation about the inadequacy of choice models rather than as a marketing tactic.
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.
Key ideas
Adding an asymmetrically dominated alternative to a choice set can increase the probability of choosing the item that dominates it.
The result points to the inadequacy of many current choice models.
It suggests product line strategies that might not otherwise be intuitively plausible, which the paper states directly.
Concepts on this site
Sources
- doi:10.1086/208899