Decoy Effect
Attraction Effect · Asymmetric Dominance Effect
The phenomenon where consumers will tend to have a specific change in preference between two options when also presented with a third option that is "asymmetrically dominated", that is, inferior in all respects to one option, but compared to the other option is inferior in some and superior in other respects — thereby nudging a preference for the dominating option.
Origin
Marketing professor Joel Huber and colleagues John Payne and Christopher Puto at Duke University demonstrated the effect in their 1982 paper "Adding Asymmetrically Dominated Alternatives," published in the Journal of Consumer Research. By introducing a third option that was clearly inferior to one of the original two, they showed they could reliably shift consumer preference — a finding that challenged the established economic principle that adding options should not change the ranking of existing ones.