Comments on: Experiencing The Endowment Effect

By: quanticle

quanticle — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 18:51:39 +0000

I’m more likely to simply buy a new hard drive. At this point search technology is good enough (and my computer skills are high enough) to allow me to retrieve pretty much whatever I want from my hard drive with little effort. However, it still takes me a fair amount of work to go through a directory tree and clear out the files that aren’t relevant anymore. As hard drive costs have plummeted in recent years, I find that the monetary cost of a new hard drive is less than the opportunity cost of cleaning out the existing drive.

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By: Cognitive Biases: Endowment Effect and Loss Aversion « Michael Graham Richard

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 20:22:44 +0000

[...] Experiencing The Endowment Effect at Overcoming Bias [...]

By: Nastunya

Nastunya — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 15:21:54 +0000

For consistency, should we be as committed to eliminating the endowment bias in interpersonal relationships as in our treatment of objects? Is there really no value to our inclination to hold on to people because they are “ours”? If we could, should we try to treat all people, already-ours and not-yet-ours, as equally valuable, all other things being equal? If so, is the quest of seeking out and maintaining committed relationships misguided? And if it isn’t, and if the endowment bias with respect to people is actually useful, should we then “practice” it by allowing it to remain in other areas in our life?

By: Alan Gunn

Alan Gunn — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 14:37:55 +0000

I don’t know of any science behind it, but books are indeed special. I was voted “class bookworm” in high school–a great honor. When my shelves overflow, I give the excess to the library, which sells them for $1. It took me years to get to the point of being able to do that.

By: David J. Balan

David J. Balan — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 00:23:09 +0000

There are a couple of recent experimental papers in the American Economic Review (2005, 2007) by Charles Plott and Kathryn Zeiler in which they more or less claim that the endowment effect doesn’t really exist. People can definitely come to be emotionally attached to things, but (they argue) the original experimental results that seemed to show that people placed extra value on things merely because they owned them aren’t right.

By: Caledonian

Caledonian — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 22:24:45 +0000

Forget the “sacredness” of books – the sheer waste and folly of un-shrinkwrapping the thing and immediately tossing it in the garbage astounds me.

Unless you got an extraordinarily good deal on it, you also have a lot of expendable income to blow.

By: Nominull

Nominull — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 21:53:20 +0000

I guess I’ve noticed a similar effect. Once I fill all my available hard-drive space, I’m more likely to stop downloading/installing new things than to clear the crap off it.

By: Ben Jones

Ben Jones — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 21:46:13 +0000

This is very strange. I never thought I had invested books with any special sort of sacred status, but reading James’ story gave me a very noticeable internal twinge. Upbringing, education, who knows why, but throwing a book away would feel odd to me. Irrational I know, but interesting nonetheless. If there’s a silver lining to this bias, let’s hope it’s that we tend to hold symbols of information and learning in such high regard.

Depending on what you have on your bookshelves of course….

I’d never heard of the Kindle, it doesn’t appear to be available in the UK. Looks very snazzy though. Does this mean we can’t judge books by their cover art?

By: Eliezer Yudkowsky

Eliezer Yudkowsky — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 19:31:16 +0000

I don’t understand the main post or several of the comments, which seem to imply that the number of books you possess would not be a monotonically increasing function of time. Isn’t this a reductio ad absurdum?

Besides, what’s the whole point of having a house (or apartment) if not to keep the rain off your books? If you owned a Kindle, why wouldn’t you just live in a 7′ x 7′ box? And what about your bookcases – how will you fit one Kindle into all of them?

The whole concept of a Kindle is silly. It will never catch on.