Is the Endowment Effect an Expectations Effect?

Ori Heffetz and John List

Artefactual Field Experiments from The Field Experiments Website

Abstract: A hallmark result within behavioral economics is that individuals' choices are affected by current endowments. A recent theory due to Koszegi and Rabin (2006) explains such endowment effect with a model of expectations-based reference-dependent preferences. Departing from past work, we conduct complementary experiments to disentangle expectations - verified probabilistic beliefs held by subjects - from other features of endowment - such as "assignment" to a good - hence allowing us to compare the effect of expectations with that of other variations. While mere assignment can affect choices, we do not find a large role in the effect for Koszegi-Rabin expectations.

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://s3.amazonaws.com/fieldexperiments-papers2/papers/00461.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: IS THE ENDOWMENT EFFECT AN EXPECTATIONS EFFECT? (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:feb:artefa:00461

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Artefactual Field Experiments from The Field Experiments Website
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Francesca Pagnotta ().