Don’t aim too high:the potential costs of high aspirations

The higher our aspirations, the higher the probability that we have toadjust them downwards when forming more realistic expectations later on.This paper shows that the costs induced by high aspirations are not trivial.We first develop a theoretical framework to identify the factors that determinethe effect of aspirations on expected utility. Then we present evidence from alab experiment on the factor found to be crucial: the adjustment of referencestates to changes in expectations. The results suggest that the costs of highaspirations can be significant, since reference states do not adjust quickly.We use a novel, indirect approach that allows us to infer the determinants ofthe reference state from observed behavior, rather than to rely on cheap talk.