Context effects in consumer decision-making: developments in experimental realism and a framework to establish practical relevance

There are repeatedly raised concerns that marketing and consumer research often neglects to implement realistic studies that foster generalizability to real-world contexts, thereby limiting their findings’ practical relevance. Representative of this issue, confidence in context effects’ (i.e., shifts in consumer preferences based on specific choice set compositions) applicability to actual consumer decisions was challenged. Indeed, prior investigations demonstrated that context effects research generally contained low levels of realism, resulting in calls to implement a set of proposed guidelines (e.g., consequential instead of hypothetical choices) to produce generalizable and practically relevant insights. This present systematic literature review analyzes a total of 460 individual assessments of 15 context effects in product choice from over 40 years in 30 top-tier marketing journals whether they implemented these guidelines as well as further experimental characteristics. Despite notable improvements, there are still overall low levels of realism—most critically by not imposing economic consequences—but pronounced differences in the degree of generalizability between the analyzed context effects, with the attraction and compromise effect having the most solid foundation regarding relevant results. Consequently, this article presents a refined and easy-to-follow framework to implement realistic context effects research as well as a research agenda to generate practically relevant future findings in a systematic approach. For practitioners, this article provides an overview of context effects’ level of confidence regarding their current real-world applicability as well as guidance on how to identify research that is relevant for their application scenarios.