Evidence of Illusion of Control - the fact that people believe to have control over pure chance events - is a recurrent finding in experimental psychology. Results in economics find instead little to no support. In this paper we test whether this dissonant result across disciplines is due to the...

We test whether markets are needed to mitigate the effects of anchoring on peoples' pref- erences. We anchor subjects by asking them if they are willing to sell a bottle of wine for a transparently uninformative random price. We elicit subjects' Willingness-To-Accept for the bottle before and...

Personal autonomy has been argued to be fundamental to well-being and is often discussed as an important driver of economic and political behavior. Yet, preferences for autonomy are not well understood, because their identification requires the separation of instrumental value attached to...

We study the idea that seemingly unrelated behavioral biases can coevolve if they jointly compensate for the errors that any one of them would give rise to in isolation. We suggest that the "endowment effect" and the "winner's curse" could have jointly survived natural selection together. We...

We study the idea that seemingly unrelated behavioral biases can coevolve if they jointly compensate for the errors that any one of them would give rise to in isolation. We suggest that the “endowment effect” and the “winner's curse” could have jointly survived natural selection...

The purpose of Plott and Zeiler (2005) — henceforth, PZ — was to investigate whether previously published experiments using consumption goods such as mugs and candy bars to measure gaps between willingness to pay (WTP) and willingness- to-accept (WTA) support endowment effect theory (EET)....

A robust finding in economics is that decision-makers often exhibit a much smaller dollar willingness to pay (WTP) for an item than the minimum amount that they claim to be willing to accept (WTA) to part with it. The spread between these two numbers is particularly large for public goods,...