The Endowment Effect, Status Quo Bias and Loss Aversion: Rational Alternative Explanation

The endowment effect, status quo bias, and loss aversion are robust and well documented results from experimental psychology. They introduce a wedge between the prices at which one is willing to sell or buy a good. The objective of this paper is to address this wedge. We show that the presence of asymmetric information in a rational-agent framework can account for the endowment effect, status quo bias and loss aversion as well as psychology-based explanations proposed in the past.