Consumers will completely change their preference between two options when presented with a third, asymmetrically dominated option designed solely to manipulate them.

A closer look

Consumers will completely change their preference between two options when presented with a third, asymmetrically dominated option designed solely to manipulate them. If you see a small popcorn for four dollars and a large for eight, you might hesitate, but the moment the theater introduces a medium for seven dollars and fifty cents, your brain is magically tricked into thinking the large is a fantastic bargain. You happily hand over your hard-earned cash, genuinely believing you outsmarted the system by securing maximum kernel volume. In reality, a bunch of corporate psychologists just successfully hijacked your deeply flawed sense of relative value, proving once again that free will in a capitalist society is little more than a carefully engineered illusion