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Full-Text Articles in Law
Predicting Variation In Endowment Effect Magnitudes, Owen D. Jones, C. Jaeger, S. Brosnan, D. Levin
Predicting Variation In Endowment Effect Magnitudes, Owen D. Jones, C. Jaeger, S. Brosnan, D. Levin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Hundreds of studies demonstrate human cognitive biases that are both inconsistent with “rational” decisionmaking and puzzlingly patterned. One such bias, the “endowment effect” (also known as “reluctance to trade”), occurs when people instantly value an item they have just acquired at a much higher price than the maximum they would have paid to acquire it. This bias impedes a vast range of real-world transactions, making it important to understand. Prior studies have documented items that do or do not generate endowment effects, and have noted that the effects vary in magnitude. But none has predicted any of the substantial between-item …
The Problems With Decision-Making, Joanna K. Sax
The Problems With Decision-Making, Joanna K. Sax
Faculty Scholarship
Our society faces major challenges in numerous areas, including climate change and healthcare. Addressing these problems with technological advances are of great importance. Increasingly, however, consumers are resisting or rejecting such technological interventions based on inappropriate assignment of risk. In other words, the consumer assessment of risk is not in line with evidence-based assessment of risk. This article focuses on two controversial areas, vaccines and genetically engineered food, as examples in which consumers assign a high risk despite an evidence-based assessment of low risk. This article describes how empirically tested decision-making theories explain why consumers inappropriately assign risk. While these …