The role of visual attention in opportunity cost neglect and consideration

Abstract

Choices necessitate opportunity costs: choosing one option means foregoing another. Despite their critical role in decision making, people often neglect opportunity costs and are less likely to make purchases when reminded of them. Here, we seek to understand whether and how opportunity-cost neglect can be explained by attention, a relationship that has been proposed but not explicitly tested. Participants made eye-tracked, incentivized purchase decisions in two conditions: one with implicit opportunity costs (e.g., “Buy” vs. “Do Not Buy”) and one with explicit opportunity costs (e.g., “Buy” vs. “Keep Money”). Across two studies (approximately 30,000 choices), we find lower purchase rates when opportunity costs are explicit. More importantly, we show that the relationship between attention and opportunity cost considerations is two-fold. First, the amount of attention to the outside option is greater when opportunity costs are explicit, which partly accounts for the effect of opportunity cost salience on choice. Second, for some framings, the predictive power of attention to opportunity costs is greater when opportunity costs are explicit. Using the attentional drift-diffusion model, we model the effect of opportunity cost salience on choice via attention. These findings help explain why people are more likely to purchase when explicit opportunity cost reminders are absent.