Endowment Effects in Proposal Rights Contests

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

We experimentally investigate a two-stage game where players compete to be rec-ognized as a proposer in the first stage and play an ultimatum bargaining game in the second stage. We introduce a treatment regarding whether one of the subjects is framed to have proposal rights (without any material advantage) in the begin-ning of the game. We found that subjects who were framed to be “incumbents” spent significantly more resources to keep their proposal rights than others. We also present and analyze additional behavioral patterns observed in our proposal rights contest experiment.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)449-476
Number of pages28
JournalJournal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics
Volume177
Issue number4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Ever since Kahneman and his colleagues published a seminal work on the endowment effect, this subject has been extensively studied in economics across various contexts (e.g., a lottery ticket in Knetsch and Sinden, 1987, a mug in Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler, 1990, a gift certificate in Sen and Johnson, 1997, and a college basketball ticket in Carmon and Ariely, 2000). While most studies have investigated the endowment effect with tangible goods, only a few studies have focused on intangible goods such as visibility (Rowe, d’Arge, and Brookshire, 1980) and the risk of road injuries (Dubourg, Jones-Lee, and Loomes, 1994). This study con- * Associate Professors, School of Economics, Yonsei University, Seoul, Republic of Korea. Corresponding author: Chulyoung Kim. We are grateful to Ralph-C. Bayer and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments that substantially improved our paper. We also thank Syngjoo Choi, Subhasish Chowdhury, Joo Young Jeon, Duk Gyoo Kim, Juanjuan Meng, Euncheol Shin, Robert Sugden, Liang Choon Wang, and the participants at various conferences for valuable comments. We thank Ino Cho, Seura Ha, Jisu Lee, and Myunghwan Lee for research assistance. This work was supported by the Yonsei University Future-leading Research Initiative of 2020 (#2020-22-0076).

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Mohr Siebeck.

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Economics and Econometrics

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Endowment Effects in Proposal Rights Contests'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this