Nico Neumann

Who they are

Neumann's work cited on this site is the 2016 meta-analysis, which examined how the design of a study changes the size of the compromise effect and the related tendency called extremeness aversion.

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

Key papers

A meta-analysis of extremeness aversion (2016), with Böckenholt and Sinha. The authors gathered 142 experimental observations of extremeness aversion, the propensity to avoid extreme options in a choice. They found the effect reliable: middle options were selected significantly more often than other options. They also found that its strength varied substantially, by up to three times the average, depending on methodological decisions. Using price-against-quality trade-offs, non-durable product categories, or comparisons between two-option and three-option sets tended to reduce the effect. Using more trade-off dimensions, attributes described without numbers, high-quality extensions or utilitarian products tended to increase it.

The paper also compared three ways researchers had measured the effect: changes in absolute shares, shifts in relative shares, and the proportion choosing the middle option. It found that the three measures can give rather different effect sizes and even contradictory conclusions about what strengthens or weakens the effect.

Key ideas

The central idea is that a well-established effect can still vary widely in size, and that much of the variation follows from how it is tested. For anyone applying the compromise effect, that matters: a choice between prices and quality levels, which is the usual commercial case, is one of the settings in which the meta-analysis found the effect tended to be weaker.

The paper builds on the 1989 work of Itamar Simonson, who named the compromise effect, and on Simonson and Amos Tversky's 1992 statement of extremeness aversion.

---