Further explanations for context effects: a perspective of ideal and reference points

Context effects have recently become the one of the main areas of study for understanding consumer choice behavior because they violate two well-known principals: independence from irrelevant alternatives (IIA) and regularity. Four context effects, namely, the attraction, compromise, attribute-balance, and phantom effects are highlighted and (re)explained in this paper. Although several studies have developed choice models that account for a specific context effects, little attention has been given to a general framework to explain context effects within an integrated concept. In this study, the concept of ideal and reference points is proposed to achieve that purpose.