Good multiple choice question for education
You could probably ask this as well on MathEducators. To be clear, I haven't found any academic study about it, but even if there was one, you should know in advance what you are expecting to achieve.

I interpret your answer as in: "Should multiple questions allow options to be eliminated with partial effort?"

The answer of course, is that it depends a lot. Think carefully about:


  What kind of test are you preparing?
  Is this a regular exam for elementary school that accumulates points which eventually determine if students are approved for the next year?
  If so, and if questions are easy already, I'd go for the equal chance for each alternative.


Or are you preparing an admission exam? 
In easy admission exams, every bit of knowledge should count, so that the guys who knows nearly nothing is ahead of the one who knows nothing.
In difficult/competitive admission exams, people who are to be admitted are limited in their score by their performance accuracy, not by their knowledge, and possibly by their speed. So these tests are designed to have very good students getting around 70% of the maximum score. I've known such tests to contain this kind of problem either to mitigate the effect of very difficult questions (you give an easy way for the student), or to give time to the ones who master the subject well enough to think how to approach the problem even if they know a standard (and time consuming) solution method.


  What average score should students get?


Again, If you are expecting bad students to get good grades, maybe you shouldn't bother to make it even easier, but if you expect good students to have bad grades, then why not?


  Are you evaluating effort or just results?


Maybe you are giving 3 absurd options and 1 reasonable 1. Maybe you are giving 4 reasonable options, but some of them can be eliminated with knowledge of the subject. The first case only rewards students for reading the answers, while the seconds can measure some level of knowledge on the subject. Makings options impossible to eliminate rewards the student for the effort of solving the question, this is well represented in calculation intensive questions. But if the question is simple and "you either know it or you don't" (think asking who painted the Mona Lisa), you can make eliminating options difficult.

So effortless question does not give much room for allowing options to be eliminated, but work intensive question do. IMHO.