The other day my sweet and tender leaves of a women's magazine preferred while I spent time to play mini-games all the more stupid than the other . Without warning, she exclaims "Oh, look! By sending an SMS, you can win a pendant in the shape of the key to Alice in Wonderland !!!". While she frantically seized his laptop, I shrug my shoulders, knowing that any attempt to discourage would make me look like a killjoy whose cynical part of childhood was irrevocably destroyed by a background in economics a little too far.
And then the unbelievable happens: she wins. Amid the various comments on it expresses his girlfriends will be jealous and she had the chance to win when she did not believe she uttered this sentence: "In addition, it is not shit, this is something that is worth at least 90 euros! ". Then I take this time to chill the atmosphere in casant some behavioral economics:
"90 Euros? So you'll sell it on eBay?
- Kwaaaa! It will not! I won , I care!
- But then'd have been willing to spend 90 euros to buy?
- No, I do not think it's too expensive. I was not prepared to EUR 90 in there. "
Fearing an early separation, I refrained from making the comment that I will develop now in this post. Behind this attitude ultimately little surprising, one who shares my life has a behavior that is inconsistent with regard to standard economics.
For the economist "standard" a little silly and locked in his neo-classical (bouh. .. at stake!), Naomi (his name) is not interested in money as such, but goods that money can get. If she has 90 euros, it prefers to buy the pendant, she prefers to be another good *, put a two-day park asterix example (if you count lunch, ice, souvenirs and parking, we must not be far from that price!).
If she refuses to buy the pendant to 90 euros, she reveals she prefers to use the money for something else, such as the Parc Astérix. Parc Asterix is preferred the pendant.
If it receives a pendant and refuses to sell it to collect 90 euros would be used to go to Parc Asterix, this means that the pendant is preferred Park Asterix.
Where an inconsistency! Normally, or you prefer to have the pendant, or you'd rather have the 90 euros (or the day at Parc Asterix we can afford to).
Seen otherwise perfectly rational for an individual, the maximum price which he is prepared to buy a property should be strictly equal to the minimum price at which he is willing to sell that property **. These two prices are equal to the subjective value the individual attaches to the property.
However, we observe in many experiments, that once a person owns property, it is not prepared to sell unless they offered him a substantial sum ***. This phenomenon is called "bias staffing" and refers to the fact that the subjective value that attaches to a property is much higher when has it that when you do not have.
This bias staffing allows us to understand why For example, I still keep the video games I do not play more instead of selling them on the internet (yet, to snitch, I could not be further from 150 to 200 euros), why some investors are reluctant to sell financial assets whose prices collapse, or why many French people refuse to place not even a penny of their hard earned money in risky assets that yield twice as much on average a savings account (but run the risk of losing the fruits of his labor at which it is attached !)****.
How is it that the human brain is not affected by this "lack of rationality" ?
evolutionary economics can offer us some ideas. In our society, markets are functioning relatively well. If I want to sell my possessions at the flea market, it is unlikely that an interested buyer m'assome a blow to steal my possessions, leaving me motionless on the pavement. Similarly, I can leave my apartment without fear (exceedingly) to find it broken and emptied of its contents.
However, it was not too long (that is to say, the prehistory), this scenario was not so unlikely as that. The exchange was not a natural act and easy because of the risk of attack and rob. Thus, individuals who gave an excessive value to their possessions were probably an advantage and have been selected by evolution. Our brain is "programmed" to protect our possessions, and through staffing is a tool that evolution has found to achieve this goal.
Today, the environment has changed: the police protects us, the law can enforce contracts, they punish the thieves, we can find markets for buying and selling anything and everything ... But our brain, it has not had time to adapt and still has the properties that were useful there are over 5000 years, but which are now cons-productive.
Today, the environment has changed: the police protects us, the law can enforce contracts, they punish the thieves, we can find markets for buying and selling anything and everything ... But our brain, it has not had time to adapt and still has the properties that were useful there are over 5000 years, but which are now cons-productive.
This theory is more convincing than through staffing is not observed in humans but also in monkeys !
Meanwhile, Naomi has received the pendant and it is very nice :-)
* Some will say it can also save the money. That said, if you consider the savings as deferred consumption, we can always imagine that she hesitated between buying the pendant today or buy another property later and it is the same.
** The most finicky I will point out that it is true that in the absence of transaction costs. Indeed, sell an item on eBay requires some effort: you have to post the ad, answer questions from potential buyers, ship the package ... Nevertheless, the gap between the reserve price to purchase and reserve price for sale is so huge that the only transaction costs can not explain it.
*** See for example the chapter on staffing through the work of Dan Ariely It's (Really) I who decides.
**** There is a great proximity between the bias and the endowment loss aversion, the fact that assesses different losses and gains in a risky environment (on average, people give weight twice as large losses as gains in their decision-making).
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