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American Economic Review Vol. 101 No. 2 2011

The Willingness to Pay—Willingness to Accept Gap, the “Endowment Effect,” Subject Misconceptions, and Experimental Procedures for Eliciting Valuations: Comment

Andrea Isoni1; Graham Loomes2; Robert Sugden3

1 Department of Economics, University of Warwick, Coventry (UK), CV4 7AL, UK. · 2 Department of Economics, University of Warwick, Coventry (UK), CV4 7AL. · 3 Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Science and School of Economics, University of East Anglia, Norwich (UK), NR4 7TJ.

Abstract

Plott and Zeiler (2005) report that the willingness-to-pay/willingness-to-accept disparity is absent for mugs in a particular experimental setting, designed to neutralize misconceptions about the procedures used to elicit valuations. This result has received sustained attention in the literature. However, other data from that same study, not published in that paper, exhibit a significant and persistent disparity when the same experimental procedures are applied to lotteries. We report new data confirming both results, thereby suggesting that the presence or absence of a disparity may be a more complex issue than some may have supposed.

DOI
10.1257/aer.101.2.991
Volume
101
Issue
2
Pages
991-1011
Language
en
Sources
openalex bibtex:phds-export.bib crossref

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