Endowment Effect Was Enhance by Greater Psychological Ownership on Choice Under Risk

• Main Authors: Szu-Yi Chang, 張思毅
• Other Authors: Chun-I Yeh
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/42wfb2

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 心理學研究所 === 106 === The endowment effect is a tendency to value a good more when owning it. The size of the endowment effect was affected by the reward probability of the owning lottery. By country, it was also found that the preference for a good was not affected by the owning probability. Growing evidence also supported that psychological ownership could enhance the endowment effect. However, it was found that the sense of ownership might be modulated by the good’s attributes. Thus, whether the endowment effect was influenced by reward probability or not remained an open question. In this study, we investigated the influence of lottery attributes on endowment effect under different levels of psychological ownership. Thirty subjects (15 females) carried out 72 trials of sequential two-alternative forced-choice between an owned lottery and a new. Psychological ownership of the owned was manipulated by the source of receiving. The new was a lottery that differed from the owned in both reward probability and reward magnitude. Here we reported four main findings. First, psychological ownership of the owned lottery increased the keeping tendency. Second, the influence of the psychological ownership was regulated by the relative riskiness of the owned lottery. Third, both mean and difference on each attribute (probability or reward) between options increased the weighting of that attribute on the decision. Fourth, psychological ownership enhanced the influence of the attribute difference in which the owned lottery was higher than the new, and decreased the influence of the attribute difference in which the owned lottery was lower. In summary, we found that a greater sense of ownership on a risky endowment enhanced the endowment effect through the biased weighting on each relative attribute to enlarge the preference for the owned option.