IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/95764.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Endowment effect and the gap between WTP and WTA

Author

Listed:
  • Qin, Botao

Abstract

I used an auction experiment in China and confirmed that there is a WTP-WTA gap. I used the solemn oath commitment device and found that it reduces the gap in the long possession treatment. However, the gap still exists in the short possession treatment. The evidence suggests that taking an oath to tell the truth with an incentive-compatible mechanism could mitigate the WTP-WTA gap.

Suggested Citation

  • Qin, Botao, 2019. "Endowment effect and the gap between WTP and WTA," MPRA Paper 95764, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:95764
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/95764/1/MPRA_paper_95764.pdf
    File Function: original version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jack L. Knetsch & J. A. Sinden, 1984. "Willingness to Pay and Compensation Demanded: Experimental Evidence of an Unexpected Disparity in Measures of Value," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 99(3), pages 507-521.
    2. Joseph Henrich, 2001. "In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 91(2), pages 73-78, May.
    3. Tunçel, Tuba & Hammitt, James K., 2014. "A new meta-analysis on the WTP/WTA disparity," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 68(1), pages 175-187.
    4. Botond Kőszegi & Matthew Rabin, 2006. "A Model of Reference-Dependent Preferences," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 121(4), pages 1133-1165.
    5. Nicolas Jacquemet & Alexander James & Stéphane Luchini & Jason F. Shogren, 2017. "Referenda Under Oath," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 67(3), pages 479-504, July.
    6. Carlsson, Fredrik & Kataria, Mitesh & Krupnick, Alan & Lampi, Elina & Löfgren, Åsa & Qin, Ping & Sterner, Thomas, 2013. "The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—A multiple country test of an oath script," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 89(C), pages 105-121.
    7. repec:hal:pseose:halshs-00731244 is not listed on IDEAS
    8. Shogren, Jason F. & Cho, Sungwon & Koo, Cannon & List, John & Park, Changwon & Polo, Pablo & Wilhelmi, Robert, 2001. "Auction mechanisms and the measurement of WTP and WTA," Resource and Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 23(2), pages 97-109, April.
    9. Jacquemet, Nicolas & Joule, Robert-Vincent & Luchini, Stéphane & Shogren, Jason F., 2013. "Preference elicitation under oath," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 65(1), pages 110-132.
    10. Shogren, Jason F. & Seung Y. Shin & Dermot J. Hayes & James B. Kliebenstein, 1994. "Resolving Differences in Willingness to Pay and Willingness to Accept," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 84(1), pages 255-270, March.
    11. Samuel Bowles & Robert Boyd & Colin Camerer & Ernst Fehr & Herbert Gintis & Joseph Henrich & Richard McElreath, 2001. "In search of homo economicus: Experiments in 15 small-scale societies," Artefactual Field Experiments 00068, The Field Experiments Website.
    12. John A. List, 2003. "Does Market Experience Eliminate Market Anomalies?," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 118(1), pages 41-71.
    13. Andrea Isoni & Graham Loomes & Robert Sugden, 2011. "The Willingness to Pay—Willingness to Accept Gap, the "Endowment Effect," Subject Misconceptions, and Experimental Procedures for Eliciting Valuations: Comment," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(2), pages 991-1011, April.
    14. Mariah D. Ehmke & Jayson L. Lusk & John A. List, 2008. "Is Hypothetical Bias a Universal Phenomenon? A Multinational Investigation," Land Economics, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 84(3), pages 489-500.
    15. Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky, 2013. "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Leonard C MacLean & William T Ziemba (ed.), HANDBOOK OF THE FUNDAMENTALS OF FINANCIAL DECISION MAKING Part I, chapter 6, pages 99-127, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    16. de-Magistris, Tiziana & Pascucci, Stefano, 2014. "The effect of the solemn oath script in hypothetical choice experiment survey: A pilot study," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 123(2), pages 252-255.
    17. Hanemann, W Michael, 1991. "Willingness to Pay and Willingness to Accept: How Much Can They Differ?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 81(3), pages 635-647, June.
    18. Horowitz, John K. & McConnell, Kenneth E., 2002. "A Review of WTA/WTP Studies," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 44(3), pages 426-447, November.
    19. Charles R. Plott & Kathryn Zeiler, 2005. "The Willingness to Pay–Willingness to Accept Gap, the "Endowment Effect," Subject Misconceptions, and Experimental Procedures for Eliciting Valuations," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(3), pages 530-545, June.
    20. Willig, Robert D, 1976. "Consumer's Surplus without Apology," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 66(4), pages 589-597, September.
    21. Boyce, Rebecca R, et al, 1992. "An Experimental Examination of Intrinsic Values as a," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 82(5), pages 1366-1373, December.
    22. Keith M. Marzilli Ericson & Andreas Fuster, 2011. "Expectations as Endowments: Evidence on Reference-Dependent Preferences from Exchange and Valuation Experiments," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 126(4), pages 1879-1907.
    23. Timothy N. Cason & Charles R. Plott, 2014. "Misconceptions and Game Form Recognition: Challenges to Theories of Revealed Preference and Framing," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 122(6), pages 1235-1270.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Christina McGranaghan & Steven G. Otto, 2022. "Choice uncertainty and the endowment effect," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 65(1), pages 83-104, August.
    2. Andrea Isoni, 2011. "The willingness-to-accept/willingness-to-pay disparity in repeated markets: loss aversion or ‘bad-deal’ aversion?," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 71(3), pages 409-430, September.
    3. Smith, Alec, 2019. "Lagged beliefs and reference-dependent utility," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 167(C), pages 331-340.
    4. John List, 2020. "Experimental tests of the endowment effect and the Coase theorem," Natural Field Experiments 00687, The Field Experiments Website.
    5. Sayman, Serdar & Onculer, Ayse, 2005. "Effects of study design characteristics on the WTA-WTP disparity: A meta analytical framework," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 26(2), pages 289-312, April.
    6. Committee, Nobel Prize, 2017. "Richard H. Thaler: Integrating Economics with Psychology," Nobel Prize in Economics documents 2017-1, Nobel Prize Committee.
    7. Jiqiang Wang & Fu Gu & Yingpeng Liu & Ying Fan & Jianfeng Guo, 2020. "An Endowment Effect Study in the European Union Emission Trading Market based on Trading Price and Price Fluctuation," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 17(9), pages 1-13, May.
    8. Oben K Bayrak & Bengt Kriström, 2016. "Is there a valuation gap? The case of interval valuations," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 36(1), pages 218-236.
    9. Amoah, Anthony & Ferrini, Silvia & Schaafsma, Marije, 2019. "Electricity outages in Ghana: Are contingent valuation estimates valid?," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 135(C).
    10. Liu, Runqiu & Jiang, Jian & Yu, Chao & Rodenbiker, Jesse & Jiang, Yongmu, 2021. "The endowment effect accompanying villagers' withdrawal from rural homesteads: Field evidence from Chengdu, China," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 101(C).
    11. John K. Horowitz & Kenneth E. McConnell & James J. Murphy, 2013. "Behavioral foundations of environmental economics and valuation," Chapters, in: John A. List & Michael K. Price (ed.), Handbook on Experimental Economics and the Environment, chapter 4, pages 115-156, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    12. María del Pilar García Pachón, 2016. "Instrumentos Económicos Y Financieros Para La Gestión Ambiental," Books, Universidad Externado de Colombia, Facultad de Derecho, number 853, July.
    13. Lindsay, Luke, 2019. "Adaptive loss aversion and market experience," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 168(C), pages 43-61.
    14. Steven G. Medema, 2020. "The Coase Theorem at Sixty," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 58(4), pages 1045-1128, December.
    15. Edward J. Lopez & W. Robert Nelson, 2005. "The Endowment Effect in a Public Good Experiment," Experimental 0512001, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    16. Graham Loomes & Shepley Orr & Robert Sugden, 2009. "Taste uncertainty and status quo effects in consumer choice," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 39(2), pages 113-135, October.
    17. Bodo Sturm & Joachim Weimann, 2006. "Experiments in Environmental Economics and Some Close Relatives," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 20(3), pages 419-457, July.
    18. Venkatachalam, L., 2008. "Behavioral economics for environmental policy," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 67(4), pages 640-645, November.
    19. Jacobs Martin, 2016. "Accounting for Changing Tastes: Approaches to Explaining Unstable Individual Preferences," Review of Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 67(2), pages 121-183, August.
    20. Fischel, William A., 1995. "The offer/ask disparity and just compensation for takings: A constitutional choice perspective," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 15(2), pages 187-203, June.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Endowment effect; WTP-WTA gap; Oath;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior
    • D46 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - Value Theory

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:95764. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Joachim Winter (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.