John W. Payne

Who they are

John W. Payne is professor emeritus of business administration in the marketing area at Duke's Fuqua School of Business, with appointments as professor of psychology and neuroscience and professor of law at Duke. His Fuqua profile gives a BA (1969), MA (1972) and PhD (1973) in psychology from the University of California, Irvine, and a postdoctoral fellowship in cognitive psychology at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1973 and 1974. It describes his research as how people make decisions and how decision making might be improved, with a focus on decision making under risk. It lists four authored or edited books, including The Adaptive Decision Maker, and more than 100 articles and chapters, and honours that include the first Journal of Consumer Research award for long-term contribution to consumer research and fellowships of the American Psychological Association (2007) and the American Psychological Society (1995).

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 can raise the chance that people choose the item that dominates it, which many standard choice models rule out.

The 1982 paper noted that the result suggests product line strategies that might not otherwise be intuitively plausible.

In 2014 he was a co-author of the reply to critics of the attraction effect.

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