This cognitive distortion consists of adding a third offer that is generally not supposed to be purchased – a decoy – which has considerable influence on the sales process. Consumers make up 85 to 95 percent of their purchasing decisions unconsciously and are, therefore, susceptible to both unconscious cognitive distortions and deliberate external manipulation.
American marketing professor Joel Huber and his colleagues first researched and described the decoy effect in 1982. Huber and his team discovered that it is easy to persuade consumers to make a choice when wavering in their decision between two products with different prices. This is done by introducing a third decoy product that is higher in quality and/or much more expensive.
The key to a successful decoy is to present a product that is "asymmetrically dominating," meaning that it is superior in at least one aspect to the comparison products. Viewed from the perspective of cognitive psychology, one reason this approach works is that the decoy effect successfully appeals to the humanreward system.