The Wistar-Kyoto rat as a model relevant to inattentive ADHD: substrain variability and affective comorbidity.

Every decision people make in life requires them to compare between choice options that each has multiple attributes. These decisions are thought to be either based on aggregation of the options’ attributes, or on applying different heuristics on these attributes. Understanding multi-attribute choice behavior has been a major challenge in economics and psychology, with numerous models and theories developed over the years. This challenge further deepens as researchers do not have access to the entire set of attributes that people represent in their minds for the choice options in question. Furthermore, it is well-known that choices are influenced not only by the attributes of each individual choice option, but also by the interaction with the attributes of other available options, a phenomenon known as choice context effects. One of the most well-known context effects in decision-making is called the “decoy effect”. It occurs when adding a third inferior “decoy” option to a set of two options, and while this third option is rarely selected, it influences the propensity of choosing one of the original options (“target”) over the other (“competitor”). For example, a coffee shop owner could add a medium-sized high-priced cup of coffee to a menu already including a large high-priced cup and a small low-priced cup, to increase the number of people buying the large cup instead of the small one. The decoy effect has been studied extensively over the past four decades using various stimuli and explained by many computational models. When studying decoy effects, researchers usually face two interacted problems. First, they try to understand how the attributes of choice options interact to affect participants’ choices. Second, researchers cannot describe the full attribute space of multi-attribute options, which often include latent attributes that cannot be explicitly described. For example, a car could be described only by its price and emission rating, but also has less explicit attributes such as color, overall design, and brand reputation, which affect the buyers’ choices.