PHD THESIS SUMMARY: Choice Architecture: A Message and Environment Perspective

Abstract

Contrary to standard theories of decision making, which posit that preferences are invariant across logically equivalent choice scenarios, experimental evidence shows that even theoretically irrelevant aspects of a decisional context can affect choices (for an overview, see Shafir 2013, especially Part 8). For instance, food choice may be affected by the prominence or order of items on display, whereby those that are more prominently displayed may draw the consumer’s attention and be selected in response (e.g., Dayan and Bar-Hillel 2011). The idea that supposedly irrelevant features of the choice context matter for the final decision is encapsulated in the concept of ‘choice architecture’, that is, the way in which a choice situation is ‘designed’ and presented to the decision maker (Thaler and Sunstein 2009; Thaler, Sunstein, and Balz 2013). More specifically, a choice architecture includes not only the options available and the budget constraint, but also the options’ order and prominence, the way in which they are described to the decision maker (e.g., if information is framed in positive or negative terms), the presence of default options, the rules or norms that govern the decision, and so on. Given the plethora of aspects that form a choice architecture (and that can affect the final decision), decision theorists and policy makers have strived to advance models and frameworks to analyze and design choice architectures (e.g., Johnson et al. 2012; Thaler, Sunstein, and Balz 2013; Lades and Delaney 2022).