Wingmen and wingwomen To improve your chances on the dating scene, you have decided to recruit a wingman or wingwoman.

(a) How, in general terms, should you choose your wingman or wingwoman?

(b) Imagine that your attractiveness and intelligence are both rated 9 on a 10-point scale. You have two competitors: one whose attractiveness is 10 and intelligence 8, and another whose attractiveness is 8 and intelligence 10. In what range would you want your wingman or wingwoman’s attractiveness and intelligence to fall?

(c) If somebody asks you to be his or her wingman or wingwoman, what does this analysis suggest he or she thinks about your attractiveness and intelligence? How does this help us explain the subscription offers in Table 3.1? Each option can be represented as a bundle of three different goods: online access, paper subscription, and attractive price. Thus, option 1 can be represented as 〈1, 0, 1〉 because it includes online access, does not include a paper subscription, but has an attractive price. Similarly, option 2 can be represented as 〈0, 1, 0 〉 and option 3 as 〈1, 1, 0〉. From this way of representing the options, it is quite clear that option 2 is (weakly) asymmetrically dominated by option 3. If the analysis offered in this section is correct, the introduction of the (inferior) option 2 might still drive customers to option 3, which is what The Economist wanted and expected. The decoy effect is only one form of menu dependence. Another effect that has received a great deal of attention, especially in marketing literature, is the compromise effect: people’s tendency to choose an alternative that represents a compromise or middle option in the menu. The phenomenon is sometimes described as resulting from extremeness aversion: a tendency to avoid options at the extremes of the relevant dimension. A high-end brand might try to drive business to their expensive products by introducing a super-expensive product; although the superexpensive product might never sell, it could make the expensive product stand out as an attractive compromise between the cheap and the superexpensive one. Low-end brands might try to do the same by introducing super-cheap products. This may be how we got diamond-studded swimsuits on the one end of the spectrum, and swimsuits made out of materials that degrade in the presence of sunlight, salt, and chlorine on the other. Various forms of menu dependence are sometimes described as context effects, because people’s decisions appear to be responsive to the context in which the decisions are made.