Research on preferential choice has rapidly grown over the past 40 years, both in terms of theory and data, and it has spread across a variety of fields, including business, consumer research, economics, management science, and psychology. However, a systematic comparison of theories against the basic facts has not been examined for many years. Consequently, it is difficult for researchers to become familiar with facts and theories outside their own fields. This article summarizes a number of major phenomena regarding preferential choice, including comparability effects, similarity effects, attraction effects, compromise effects, and reference point effects, all of which provide the benchmarks that any theory must strive to explain. The main purpose of the article is to use these benchmarks to compare the competing preferential choice theories. These theories include simple scalability models, random utility models, the elimination by aspects model, strategy switching models, the context dependent preference models, and connectionist network models of choice.
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