Effects of the addition of simple and double decoys on the purchasing process of airline tickets

• We study the effects of adding decoy options to an air tickets purchasing process.
• We evaluate the interactions between two decoy options in the same choice set.
• The use of decoy options generally leads to a relevant increase in profitability.
• The use of decoy options increases the proportion of users selecting the Target option.
• The use of decoy option reduces the proportion of users deciding not to buy.

Air ticket purchases can be considered to be based on sequential decision-making processes with a limited number of alternatives with clearly identified product attributes. With this scenario, decoy contextual effects could potentially be useful in increasing the profitability of each choice set through driving the attention of the users to a particular alternative by changing their perceptions, such as the perceived attractiveness of particular options, to benefit one specific alternative. This study validates the efficiency of the addition of decoy options in increasing the proportion of users who select the target option in a choice set and introduces, theoretically and empirically, the use of double decoys. Three distinct hypothetical choice sets are configured using two different types of decoy.