Influencing Consumer Decision With Deliberate Versioning

Thanks to my friend Helen I learned about a lever for nudging consumer behavior  called  Asymmetric Dominance Effect also known as the Decoy Effect.

Joel Huber, a marketing professor at Duke, explanined this effect in a Washington Post article (via Wikipedia entry):

What the decoy effect basically shows is that when people cannot decide between two front-runners, they use the third candidate as a sort of measuring stick. If one front-runner looks much better than the third candidate, people gravitate toward that front-runner. Third candidates, in other words, can make a complicated decision feel simple.

In fact if you release two versions, 1 and 2,  of a product, it would help you to position these two in such a way that you capture market share in respective segments. In addition to these two versions, a marketer should introduce two more versions, 3 and 4,  each one unattractive by themselves but will make both version 1 and 2 attractive to the respective segments.