A "aversão à perda" vista por uma óptica mais clássica

[38] A Better Explanation Of The Endowment Effect, por Joe Simmons (via Marginal Revolution):

Weaver and Frederick’s theory is simple: Selling and buying prices reflect two concerns. First, people don’t want to sell the mug for less, or buy the mug for more, than their own value of it. Second, they don’t want to sell the mug for less, or buy the mug for more, than the market price. This is because people dislike feeling like a sucker. [2]

To see how this produces the endowment effect, imagine you are willing to pay $1 for the mug and you believe it usually sells for $3. As a buyer, you won’t pay more than $1, because you don’t want to pay more than it’s worth to you. But as a seller, you don’t want to sell for as little as $1, because you’ll feel like a chump selling it for much less than it is worth. [3]. Thus, because there’s a gap between people’s perception of the market price and their valuation of the mug, there’ll be a large gap between selling ($3) and buying ($1) prices.

Eu por mim dispensava as partes do "feeling like a sucker" e do "feel like a chump" - esse comportamento pode ser explicado assumindo apenas agentes racionais procurando maximizar o rendimento (e que portanto não vão vender por 2 euros algo que estão convencidos que poderão vender por 3).

A Reference Price Theory of the EndowmentEffect[pdf], por Ray Weaver e Shane Frederick (Journal of Marketing Reasearch, vol. XLIX, outubro de 2012, pp. 696–707):

The common finding that selling prices exceed buying prices (the so-called endowment effect) is typically explained by the assumptions that consumers evaluate potential transactions with respect to their current holdings and that the owners of a good regard its potential loss to be more significant than nonowners regard its potential acquisition. In contrast to this “pain-of-losing” account, the authors propose that the endowment effect reflects a reluctance to trade on terms that appear unfavorable with respect to salient reference prices. In six experiments (and eight more summarized in appendixes), the authors show that manipulations that reduce the gap between valuations and reference prices reduce or eliminate the endowment effect. These results suggest that the endowment effect is often best construed as an aversion to bad deals rather than an aversion to losing possessions.