Friday, April 11, 2008

Predictably / Irrational » Blog Archive » Clinton, Obama, and the decoy effect!

Read the rest of the post and check out the book -- it's a quick and interesting read

Clinton recently suggested that if she wins the Democratic primaries, she would select Obama as her vice president. Was this a good move on her part? How should Obama have reacted to this?

The field of behavioral economics has shown a phenomenon called the asymmetric dominance effect (or the decoy effect). The basic idea is that when we are presented with two options that are rather different, we have a hard time making a choice between them.  In such cases, if a third alternative that is similar to one option but clearly inferior to it is added to the mix it can change the choices we make.  It sounds odd that adding an inferior option that no one would select would influence our choices, but it does.

Predictably / Irrational » Blog Archive » Clinton, Obama, and the decoy effect!

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