We experimentally test Kőszegi and Rabin's (2006, 2007) theory of reference-dependent preferences in the context of price expectations. In an incentivised valuation task, participants are endowed with a mug and provide their willingness to accept (WTA) to sell it. We manipulate the sale price in a separate, exogenous forced sale scenario, which is predicted to produce a 'comparison effect', moving WTA in the opposite direction to the forced sale price. Consistent with the theory, we observe a treatment effect of between AUD $0.79 and $2.06 in the hypothesised direction; however, it is statistically insignificant. We also elicit participants' loss aversion to account for heterogeneity in the theorised effect; however, controlling for the interaction between our treatment and loss aversion does not consistently strengthen our result.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.