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Context Effect on Consumer Behavior

In a study conducted on 55 undergraduate marketing students at a university in Korea, researchers set up a mixed design to test if a visual framing promoting a greater use of alternative-based processing would reduce the perceived attractiveness of compromise options. They also hypothesized that the decision process would have minimal influence on the choice of asymmetrically dominating options.

Researchers split the participants into three conditions: attribute based processing treatment, alternative based processing treatment, and the control. In order to perpetuate attribute and alternative based processing in their participants, researchers used different visual tactics to present each product. In the attribute processing group, horizontal lines were drawn in between each attribute of a product option, highlighting the various attributes of the different products within the same choice set. Conversely, in the alternative treatment group, vertical lines were drawn in between individual product options to visually separate them from one another. The control group had no visual framing treatment. Further, researchers simultaneously assessed how the attractiveness and compromise effect impacts the probability of the consumer to choose a target brand by listing two attributes for each of the three products in the choice set. Depending on the extremity in differences between each product attribute, options were either placed in the compromise or asymmetrically dominant subgroup.

The findings of this study proved their hypothesis, as the frequency of how often the compromise option was chosen depends heavily on the difference in visual framing of the attribute and alternative based processing treatments. The study found that when the alternative treatment was not promoted, the compromise effect took precedence over the participants’ decision making. Furthermore, the study showed that there was no significant difference between the attribute and control treatments, as the probability of choosing an asymmetrically dominant option was equally high across all three framing conditions.