Prize decoys at work — New experimental evidence for asymmetric dominance effects in choices on prizes in competitions

•We replicate Simonson & Tversky's (1992) prize decoy experiment to examine asymmetric dominance effects (ADE).•We discuss reasons for the failures to replicate the ADE in this specific setting as recently reported in the literature.•We ran a domain replication with three extensions: meaningful prizes, real competitions, control for attribute tradeoffs.•The between-subjects analysis of subjects’ choices on prizes (cash vs. pens) indicates a significant ADE sized 16%.•The ADE proves to be robust across demographic subgroups (e.g. male vs. female subjects, students vs. non-students).

In a controlled domain replication of the well-established prize decoy experiment, we provide new evidence for the recently disputed robustness of asymmetric dominance effects (ADEs). Specifically, using real choices between – according to pretests – meaningful options that trigger tradeoff considerations, we find an ADE sized 16% which remains robust across demographic groups. Therefore, our findings indicate that the failures to replicate the ADE in previous studies might be due to variations in the experimental choice setting.