Making choices under conflict: The impact of decision frames Parthasarathy Krishnamurthy & Anish Nagpal Published online: 2 June 2009 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2009 Abstract How do people make choices when they see two equally positive versus two equally negative decision alternatives? The cancel-and-focus hypothesis argues that when people see options in a sequence, they tend to overweight the unique attributes of the first alternative. This leads to the prediction that when both options are positive (approach–approach conflict), the first option is preferred more but that if they are both negative (avoidance-avoidance conflict), the first option is preferred less. Based on recent research, we argue that this finding may be contingent on an unrecognized compatibility confound with the decision frame of choosing versus rejecting. In this research, we argue that the choice biases predicted by the cancel- and-focus hypothesis will be more pronounced when the decision frame (choose/ reject) is incompatible with the valence of the alternatives (reject–positive and choose–negative) because such incompatibility increases processing motivation. We report two studies with varying operationalizations of decision conflict which find that cancel-and-focus effects are more pronounced under incompatibility. Taken together, these findings suggest that conflict effects are better understood by accounting for the decision frame as well. Keywords Decision frame . Decision conflict . Approach–approach . Avoidance–avoidance . Compatibility Market Lett (2010) 21:37–51 DOI 10.1007/s11002-009-9079-0 Parthasarathy Krishnamurthy and Anish Nagpal contributed equally to the paper. P. Krishnamurthy Department of Marketing and Entrepreneurship, University of Houston, 334 Melcher Hall, Houston, TX 77204, USA e-mail: partha@uh.edu A. Nagpal (*) Department of Management and Marketing, The University of Melbourne, Level 10, 198 Berkeley Street, Parkville, Victoria 3010, Australia e-mail: anagpal@unimelb.edu.au