Retro-cueing in multi-attribute choices

The influence of memory availability on strategy selection and attribute weights

authored by

Antonia Krefeld-Schwalb, Agnes Rosner

Abstract

Decision making in multi-attribute choices is adapted to the structure of the task. The availability of information in memory was recently proposed as driving this adaptation. We studied this hypothesis in the context of purchase decisions by using eye tracking and computational modelling in controlled lab experiments. We particularly manipulated memory availability through a retro-cue, thereby highlighting one attribute in a multi attribute choice task in which participants decided among products (movies, books) based on the recommendations of six reviewers. In three experiments, we observed that the retro-cue has a two-fold effect on subsequent choices. First, cueing the position of one recommendation increased the probability of choosing the recommended product. Second, cueing any recommendation led to an increase of choices in accordance with a compensatory decision strategy. Gaze analyses show that search behavior is indeed changed following the retro-cue. We further propose a computational model for describing and generalizing the effect. Keywords: consumer behavior; multi-attribute models; choice modeling; vadaptive decision making; decision research.

External Organisation(s)

University of Geneva
Universität Zürich (UZH)

Type

Preprint

Publication date

2019

Publication status

E-pub ahead of print

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG 12 - Responsible Consumption and Production

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.31234/OSF.IO/2XM9W (Access: Open)