Endowment Effects in Proposal Rights Contests

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.