Michael Lynn

Who they are

Michael Lynn is professor emeritus of consumer behavior and marketing at the Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration. Cornell's faculty profile gives his PhD in social psychology from Ohio State University (1987), an MA from the same university (1983) and a BA from the University of Texas at Austin (1979). It lists his research as consumer behavior, services marketing, service gratuities and tipping, and consumer status and uniqueness seeking, and credits him with more than 50 academic papers on tipping. It also names him as an associate editor of the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics and as editor of the Cornell Hospitality Quarterly. His attraction effect paper was written with Sybil Yang.

Key papers

Yang, S., & Lynn, M. (2014). More evidence challenging the robustness and usefulness of the attraction effect. Journal of Marketing Research, 51(4), 508-513.

Key ideas

The authors made 91 attempts to produce an attraction effect, across 23 product classes and 73 decoyed choice sets, and found 11 reliable effects, fewer than their statistical power led them to expect.

When options were distinguished by meaningful verbal descriptions or by pictures, the effects shrank substantially and were at chance levels.

The paper appeared in the same issue of the Journal of Marketing Research as Frederick, Lee and Baskin's The limits of attraction, and as Huber, Payne and Puto's reply.

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