Decoy Effect in Search Interaction: A Pilot Study

Abstract: In recent years, the influence of cognitive effects and biases on users' thinking, behaving, and decision-making has garnered increasing attention in the field of interactive information retrieval. The decoy effect, one of the main empirically confirmed cognitive biases, refers to the shift in preference between two choices when a third option (the decoy) which is inferior to one of the initial choices is introduced. However, it is not clear how the decoy effect influences user interactions with and evaluations on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). To bridge this gap, our study seeks to understand how the decoy effect at the document level influences users' interaction behaviors on SERPs, such as clicks, dwell time, and usefulness perceptions. We conducted experiments on two publicly available user behavior datasets and the findings reveal that, compared to cases where no decoy is present, the probability of a document being clicked could be improved and its usefulness score could be higher, should there be a decoy associated with the document.