Sybil Yang

Who they are

Sybil Yang is an associate professor of hospitality and tourism management in the Lam Family College of Business at San Francisco State University, where she has worked since 2011. Her faculty page gives a PhD in consumer behavior, an MBA and an MMH from Cornell, and a bachelor's degree from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. Her research covers restaurant menu, menu board and wine label design, consumer behavior and behavioral economics, and her page says her current work examines how decoys can change consumer decisions. The same page lists a 2009 Cornell Hospitality Report on menu price formats, which ties the 2014 author to the earlier menu-pricing work with Sheryl Kimes and Mauro Sessarego.

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.

Yang, S. S., Kimes, S. E., & Sessarego, M. M. (2009). $ or dollars: effects of menu-price formats on restaurant checks. Cornell Hospitality Report, 9(8).

Key ideas

In 91 attempts to produce an attraction effect, across 23 product classes and 73 decoyed choice sets, 11 gave reliable effects, fewer than the authors' statistical power led them to expect.

Effects shrank substantially, to chance levels, when options were distinguished by meaningful verbal descriptions or pictures.

---