91av

IT’S THE experience of every high-street shopper. You go to buy, say, a
television and congratulate yourself on forgoing the more expensive wide-screen
model for a no-frills version. Then your eyes catch sight of the vastly
expensive designer box with just a few new features. Suddenly the price
difference between the first two doesn’t seem that big, and you go for the
wide-screen set after all.

If this sounds familiar, don’t worry. It’s not just human consumers who don’t
know what they want. Researchers have now shown that birds and bees make similar
irrational decisions when foraging for food. This suggests that people use a
very basic decision-making process when choosing goods.

Sharoni Shafir from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, along with Tom Waite
and Brian Smith from Ohio State University, studied the foraging habits of
honeybees and Canadian grey jays. First they gave the bees two artificial
flowers—one with a short stem and not much nectar, the other with a longer
stem and more nectar. The bees showed little preference either way, since the
amount of work they did per sip of food was about the same at both flowers.

But things changed when the researchers added another flower, even though it
was a far poorer choice for nectar than the original two. If this decoy had a
very long stem, the bees swarmed to the longer of the first two flowers. And if
the decoy was tiny with practically no nectar, the bees preferred to visit the
shorter flower of the other two. So although the original flowers remained the
same, the decoy made the bees change their preference. Shafir found the effect
was even stronger with jays that were offered raisins hidden inside pipes of
different lengths.

The discovery could help conservationists. If one type of flower is
outcompeting another for pollination, for example, biologists could introduce a
decoy flower to make the bees prefer the loser.

But it will also be manna to marketing consultants. A common trick is to
introduce top-of-the-range goods to play on consumers’ aspirations, encouraging
them to buy more expensive models than they normally would. “Intuitively,
salespeople have been using this for years,” says Itamar Simonson, a marketing
researcher at Stanford University in California. We assumed, he says, that
people try to justify their actions to themselves, but maybe it’s much more
basic than that.