Picture this: You’re at a movie theater food stand loading up on snacks. You have a choice of a small, medium or large soda. The small is $3.50 and the large is $5.50. It’s a tough decision: The small size may not last you through the whole movie, but $5.50 for some sugary drink seems ridiculous. But there’s a third option, a medium soda for $5.25. Medium may be the perfect amount of soda for you, but the large is only a quarter more. If you’re like most people, you end up buying the large (and taking a bathroom break midshow).

    If you’re wondering who would buy the medium soda, the answer is almost no one. In fact, there’s a good chance the marketing department purposely priced the medium soda as a decoy (诱饵), making you more likely to buy the large soda rather than the small.

    I have written about this peculiarity in human nature before with my friend Dan Ariely, who studied this phenomenon extensively after noticing pricing for subscriptions (订阅) to The Economist. The digital subscription was $59, the print subscription was $125, and the print plus digital subscription was also $125. No one in their right mind would buy the print subscription when you could get digital as well for the same price, so why was it even an option? Ariely ran an experiment and found that when only the two “real” choices were offered, more people chose the less-expensive digital subscription. But the addition of the bad option made people much more likely to choose the more expensive print plus digital option.

    Brain scientists call this effect “asymmetric dominance” and it means that people gravitate toward the choice nearest a clearly inferior option. Marketing professors call it the decoy effect, which is certainly easier to remember. Lucky for consumers, almost no one in the business community understands it.

    The decoy effect works because of the way our brains assign value when making choices. Value is almost never absolute; rather, we decide an object’s value relative to our other choices. If more options are introduced, the value equation changes.

解析：C。根据题干中的“the bad option”可定位至第三段最后一句。该句指出，加入较差的选项后，人们更有可能选择更昂贵的纸质加电子订阅，C项表述与此相符，因此选C。

错项排除：A项利用第三段中出现的peculiarity进行干扰，但文中说的是人性的奇怪特质，并非是顾客的特殊需求（the peculiar needs），故A项排除。B项利用文中第三段出现的choices进行干扰，但文中的choices是指商家提供的选择，并没有说帮助顾客做出更理智的选择（more rational choices），故B项排除。D项的a greater variety of goods在文中并没有提到，故排除。