The Invisible Hand Guiding Your Choices: The Secret Marketers Don’t Want You to Know

Have you ever walked into a store, intending to buy a simple coffee maker, only to find yourself standing in front of three models—one cheap and basic, one moderately priced with decent features, and one expensive with all the bells and whistles?

Chances are, you walked out with the middle option, feeling like you made a smart, balanced decision. But what if I told you that your choice wasn’t entirely your own? What if I told you that one of those options was placed there purely to push you in a specific direction—without you even realizing it?

Stay with me till the end, because I’m going to reveal a powerful way you can flip this trick to your advantage in everyday life.

Marketers and businesses have long understood something that most consumers don’t:

The way choices are presented can dramatically influence what people pick.

A groundbreaking study by Joel Huber, John W. Payne, and Christopher Puto at Duke University uncovered a fascinating psychological trick—one that’s being used on you more often than you think.

Their research explored a peculiar effect in decision-making: when an inferior option—a decoy—is introduced, it can shift consumer preferences in predictable ways. And here’s the kicker: it directly violates the common assumption that adding a new option won’t change the desirability of existing ones. But it does.

So why does this matter to you? Because once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Imagine you’re choosing between two restaurants:

1. A fancy, expensive restaurant with amazing food.
2. A cheaper restaurant with decent food.

You’re torn. But then, a third option appears: 3. A more expensive restaurant with worse food than the first one.

This third option is a decoy—it’s not meant to be chosen. Instead, it exists to make the fancy restaurant look like an even better deal than it already was. Suddenly, you’re no longer struggling between luxury and budget—you’re thinking, Why would anyone pick that terrible third option? And before you know it, you’re leaning toward the fancy restaurant, feeling like you made the best possible choice.

That’s exactly what Huber and his team found in their experiments with real consumers. They tested this trick across multiple product categories—beers, cars, restaurants—and found that the mere presence of a strategically placed decoy significantly increased the likelihood of choosing a target product.

And here’s where things get really wild: this effect wasn’t just a minor statistical blip. The presence of a decoy could boost the choice of a target product by as much as 13 percentage points—enough to sway millions of decisions in a real marketplace.

The reason this happens comes down to how our brains are wired. Instead of evaluating choices objectively, we rely on relative comparisons. When faced with uncertainty, we grasp for the easiest way to make a decision—and that often means picking the option that seems like the best deal compared to what’s right in front of us.

Think about when you’re at the movies and deciding between a small popcorn for $4, a large for $10, or a medium for $9. That medium option is designed to push you toward the large—it makes the big one seem like a steal for just $1 more. The medium is the decoy, and you might not even realize you’re being nudged.

Now that you know how this works, you can do two things:

1. Become a Smarter Consumer – Next time you’re faced with a choice, ask yourself: Is one of these options just here to manipulate my decision? If so, step back and reevaluate.
2. Flip the Trick for Your Own Benefit – If you run a business, sell products, or negotiate deals, you can use the decoy effect ethically. For example, if you’re pricing your services, adding a higher-priced but slightly less valuable package could steer customers toward your preferred option.

Most people go their entire lives completely unaware that their decisions are being influenced like this. But now, you’re in on the secret. The next time you’re faced with a set of options, pause for a second. Look around. Ask yourself: Is there a decoy in play?

Because once you start seeing it, you’ll never be fooled again.

Research Paper