There is an experiment in behavioural economics which involves showing people some item — a mug or suchlike — and asking them what they might be prepared to pay for it. Some time later, you contrive to give them an identical mug for free. You then ask how much they want to hand their mug back. The figure they cite is significantly higher than before. This discrepancy, which defies conventional economic models, is known as the ‘endowment effect’.
An extreme example of this was demonstrated by Dan Ariely, who found that students who had been unsuccessful in the ticket lottery for a major Duke University basketball match were on average prepared to pay only $170 for a ticket. Yet those students who had been successful in the same lottery typically demanded $2,400 to sell their ticket to anyone else.
This bias in human thinking seems to be linked to a form of self-delusion by which we overvalue those things we already have: ‘She’s pretty because I married her’, as one psychologist has it.
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