Dynamic, connectionist models of decision making, such as decision field theory (Roe, Busemeyer, & Townsend, 2001), propose that the effect of context on choice arises from a series of pairwise comparisons between attributes of alternatives across time. As such, they predict that limiting the amount of time to make a decision should decrease rather than increase the size of contextual effects. This prediction was tested across four levels of time pressure on both the asymmetric dominance (Huber, Payne, & Puto, 1982) and compromise (Simonson, 1989) decoy effects in choice. Overall, results supported this prediction, with both types of decoy effects found to be larger as time pressure decreased.

In this research, we explore how experience with an "attraction set" of options, designed to elicit an asymmetric-dominance (attraction) effect, affects choice making in a second "compromise set" designed to elicit a compromise effect. In Experiment 1, when a compromise set was presented, subjects who had chosen an asymmetrically dominating option from an attraction set were less likely to surrender to the compromise heuristic than their counterparts who had chosen the equivalent option from a binary set. Lower susceptibility to the compromise heuristic suggests that asymmetric dominance might have facilitated the learning of attribute preferences. In Experiment 2, subjects were asked to make six choices in the personal computer category. Subjects who had chosen any number of asymmetrically dominating options from the attraction condition were less susceptible to the compromise heuristic in a subsequent choice task than their counterparts who had chosen the same number of equivalent options from the binary condition. It was unlikely that the effect was caused by better memory of asymmetrically dominating options subjects had previously chosen. Results from the two experiments corroborated the reasoning that asymmetric dominance affects the learning of attribute weights and this effect persists in a subsequent choice task.