The Decoy Subscription

Economist Dan Ariely tested this with students at MIT's Sloan School. He offered two subscriptions to The Economist: online-only for $59, or print+online for $125. With just those two, most students picked the cheaper online-only option.

Then he added a useless third choice: print-only, also $125 — the same price as print+online but clearly worse. Now the print+online choice jumped to 84%, up from 32%. The decoy existed only to make print+online look like a bargain by comparison. This is the "decoy effect," a close cousin of anchoring.