Salience and Consumer Choice

We present a theory of context-dependent choice in which a consumer’sattention is drawn to salient attributes of goods, such as qualityor price. An attribute is salient for a good when it stands out among thegood’s attributes relative to that attribute’s average level in the choiceset ðor, more broadly, the choice contextÞ. Consumers attach disproportionatelyhigh weight to salient attributes, and their choices are tiltedtoward goods with higher quality/price ratios. The model accounts fora variety of disparate evidence, including decoy effects and contextdependentwillingness to pay. It also suggests a novel theory of misleadingsales.