This article is the first to test whether the attraction effect can be replicated among recommended options in a real digital marketplace, namely – an online flight aggregator. For this purpose, we conducted a large-scale field experiment on an existing flight aggregator, in which we varied the number of the options recommended at the top of the result list. More precisely, we investigated whether recommending an additional “decoy” option, which is asymmetrically dominated by one of the two former recommended options (the cheapest or the fastest itinerary), increases users' conversion rate and impacts the market share of the recommended options. Our results, based on the analysis of more than 140,000 search sessions, suggest that this is not the case in general. We then conduct analyses on subsamples to investigate the boundary conditions of the attraction effect. This study questions the relevance of the attraction effect in online marketplaces and recommender systems and proposes new research avenues.

本文首次测试了吸引力效应是否可以在真实数字市场中的推荐选项之间复制，即在线航班聚合器。为此，我们在现有的飞行聚合器上进行了大规模的现场实验，其中我们改变了结果列表顶部推荐的选项数量。更准确地说，我们调查了推荐一个额外的“诱饵”选项，该选项由前两个推荐选项之一（最便宜或最快的行程）不对称主导，是否会提高用户的转化率并影响推荐选项的市场份额。我们基于对 140,000 多个搜索会话的分析得出的结果表明，一般情况并非如此。然后我们对子样本进行分析以研究吸引力效应的边界条件。本研究质疑在线市场和推荐系统中吸引力效应的相关性，并提出了新的研究途径。