When being wasteful appears better than feeling wasteful

Ro'i Zultan, Maya Bar-Hillel and Nitsan Guy
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Maya Bar-Hillel: Center for the Study of Rationality, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

No 2011-002, Jena Economics Research Papers from Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena

Abstract: "Waste not want not" expresses our culture's aversion to waste. "I could have gotten the same thing for less" is a sentiment that can diminish pleasure in a transaction. We study people's willingness to "pay" to avoid this spoiler. In one scenario, participants imagined they were looking for a rental apartment, and had bought a subscription to an apartment listing. If a cheaper subscription had been declined, respondents preferred not to discover post hoc that it would have sufficed. Specifically, they preferred ending their quest for the ideal apartment after seeing more, rather than fewer, apartments, so that the length of the search exceeds that available within the cheaper subscription. Other scenarios produced similar results. We conclude that people may sometimes prefer to be wasteful in order to avoid feeling wasteful.

Keywords: waste aversion; mental accounting; violation of dominance; counterfactual; regret (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D03 M31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-01-05
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https://oweb.b67.uni-jena.de/Papers/jerp2011/wp_2011_002.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: When Being Wasteful is Better than Feeling Wasteful (2010)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jrp:jrpwrp:2011-002

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