Contents

Contextual Choice, Imperfect Attribute Perception, and Decision Design in Management and Planning

Author(s): David Black1
1Co-founder and Chairman of Edinburgh’s Southside Association
David Black
Co-founder and Chairman of Edinburgh’s Southside Association

Abstract

Managers, planners, and organizational decision makers frequently evaluate options that differ across multiple attributes, yet observed choices often shift when the surrounding menu changes. Such context effects matter for product-line design, candidate screening, policy communication, and service bundling because they can change outcomes even when underlying objectives remain stable. This article develops a theory-centered account of contextual choice in which decision makers retain a stable utility function but interpret attribute information imperfectly. The framework shows why additional options can alter posterior beliefs about existing options when uncertainty in attribute perception is shared across alternatives. A tractable parametric case is used to clarify the mechanism, state the main comparative statics, and convert the formal results into testable implications for management research. The analysis shows how the same structure accommodates intransitivity, joint-separate evaluation reversal, the compromise effect, the attraction effect, and phantom decoy effects, while also preserving rational regularity when one option dominates another on all attributes. The article further explains how ternary-choice designs can be used to validate the model empirically. By translating a formal choice model into a management and planning context, the manuscript clarifies when context-sensitive choices are expected, when they should not occur, and how decision architectures can amplify, diagnose, or contain them.

Copyright © 2024 David Black. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Cite this Article

APA
Black, D. (2024). Contextual Choice, Imperfect Attribute Perception, and Decision Design in Management and Planning. Journal of Management and Planning Research, 1(1), 149-159. https://doi.org/10.66033/jmpr2024-113
MLA
Black, David. "Contextual Choice, Imperfect Attribute Perception, and Decision Design in Management and Planning." Journal of Management and Planning Research, vol. 1, no. 1, 2024, pp. 149-159.
Chicago
Black, David. "Contextual Choice, Imperfect Attribute Perception, and Decision Design in Management and Planning." Journal of Management and Planning Research 1, no. 1 (2024): 149-159. https://doi.org/10.66033/jmpr2024-113
Harvard
Black, D., 2024. Contextual Choice, Imperfect Attribute Perception, and Decision Design in Management and Planning. Journal of Management and Planning Research, 1(1), pp.149-159.
Vancouver
Black D. Contextual Choice, Imperfect Attribute Perception, and Decision Design in Management and Planning. Journal of Management and Planning Research. 2024;1(1):149-159.