The Psychological Correlates of Endowment Effect--论文代写范文精选

新古典主义经济学的角度来看,这是占主导地位的经济思维,忽视了人类道德和情感的观点实体。个人不仅被认为是完美的理性,但也有着无所不在的利益。扩展这个论点是,他们没有意识形态会影响他们的行为方式。下面的essay代写范文进行论述。

ABSTRACT
In this study conducted in Boğaziçi University with 121 participants, the psychological correlates of the endowment effect are probed. The endowment effect is the asymmetry between the amount that a given individual would like to pay for a certain good and the amount that this individual would like to accept to sell the same good. There are two types of endowment effect: The real endowment effect is the one observed in real or simulated economies, while the hypothetical endowment effect is the one exhibited for imaginary situations. Individualism-Collectivism and perspective taking are considered as psychological correlates of the endowment effect in this study. The study shows that there is at least some relationship between the real endowment effect and perspective taking and that individualism-collectivism is significantly correlated with perspective taking.

INTRODUCTION 
The problem of value has been a perennial matter of discussion for economists. The standpoint of the neoclassical school of economics, which is dominant in economic thinking, disregards the view of human beings as ethical and emotional entities. Individuals have not only been considered by this school to have an impeccable rationality, but also omnipotent will and omnipresent self-interest (Thaler, 1998). An extension of this argument is that they have no ideology which would affect the way they behave. Similarly, what England (1993) calls a “separative model” underlying the views of the neoclassical school “presumes that humans are autonomous, impervious to social influences, and lack sufficient emotional connection to each other to make empathy possible” (p. 37). 

Furthermore, their sense of belongingness is somehow ignored (Katona, 1975, p. 50). However, individuals are not only “moody, sometimes obstinately prejudiced, occasionally impulsive and often badly informed,” but they also forget and ignore (Strümpel, 1990, pp. 194-195). The conceptualisation most akin to a psychological understanding pertains to a comparative methodology through which the economic behaviours of people having different sets of values or different levels of a given set of values can be compared and contrasted for a given sphere of human activity. The proposed study will be within this stream in its purpose of comparing people in terms of their levels of endowment effect – to be explained below - as a function of two psychological variables: individualism-collectivism and perspective taking.

Decision-making and Rationality 
Rationality has been a frequent topic within any area of social sciences and philosophy at one time or another throughout a period covering more than two millennia, and the last quarter of the 20th century saw the emergence of decision 2 sciences, cognitive psychology and cognitive science which took rationality as their main theme of interest and raison d’être. Decision sciences and cognitive sciences appeared to be hybrid disciplines, while cognitive psychology empiricised one of the major questions: Are human beings (ir)rational? A useful distinction while reviewing the literature on rationality is among descriptive, normative and prescriptive approaches to the study of decision making. The descriptive approach refers to “what is” and in this case “how real people think and behave,” the normative approach refers to "what ought to be" and “how ideal people should behave under ideal conditions;” and the prescriptive approach takes up the problem of "what makes a decision better or more efficient." The criteria for evaluating these types of studies are also different: They are empirical validity, theoretical adequacy, and pragmatic value respectively (Bell, Raiffa, & Tversky, 1988, pp. 16-18). The existence of the prescriptive subtype is a consequence of the split between descriptive and normative models (Bell, Raiffa, & Tversky, 1988, p. 24). This distinction can be applied to studies of rationality and models of human behavior as well (Stanovich, 1999, pp. 3-4).

On the other hand, distinct conceptualisations of rationality resulting from departmentalisation of knowledge by each discipline have given rise to different types of rationalities. Economic rationality – the one that concerns us in this study - is associated with the notion of expected utility developed by von Neumann and Morgenstern in a way that “rational action is that action which yields the highest expected utility” (Hampton, 1998, p. 90). Roughly speaking, “[e]xpected utility theory deals with choosing among acts where the decision-maker does not know for sure which consequence will result from a chosen act. When faced with several acts, the decision-maker will choose the one with the highest ‘expected utility’, where the 3 expected utility of an act is the sum of the products of probability and utility over all possible consequences” (Schmeidler, & Wakker, 1987, p. 229). According to Tversky & Kahneman (1986), the expected utility theory consists of four principles. These are: 
1) Cancellation: This principle predicts that the equivalent and equipotent properties of a given choice pair will be omitted by the rational agent. This is strongly associated with the cognitive psychologists’ notion of the cognitive miser. 
2) Transitivity: This principle predicts that no option is treated independently of each other. If A is preferred to B, and B is preferred to C, it cannot be the case that C is preferred to A. 
3) Dominance: This principle predicts that - other things being equal – a better option in any given respect will be preferred. 4) Invariance: This principle predicts that the form in which the choice problem is presented does not effect the choice. In other words, an alternative presentation of the same choice problem is treated alike.

That rational agents should have the capacity to order alternatives or that the preferences should be complete – i.e., given a and b as alternatives, it is either a>b or b>a or a=b - can be added to this list as the fifth principle (Plous, 1993, p. 81, Hampton, 1998, p. 94). Kahneman & Tversky (1979) incorporate the asymmetry between gain and loss into their so-called “prospect theory”. Prospect theory, in contrast to expected utility theory, which predicts that the utility for one unit of loss and one unit of gain are equal, proposes that loss weighs heavier than gain. By the use of empirical tools - scenarios which involve decision-making for two alternatives - Kahneman & Tversky (1979) showed that expected utility theory as a descriptive model is flawed. Tversky, & Kahneman (1986) cited some experiments which negate the truth value of the 4 invariance principle. 

Due to the linguistic framing of the problems, people made a choice A rather than B in one of the framings of the same choice pair while choosing B rather than A in another one. The experiments also point out that people do not behave in accordance with dominance principle. Luce who introduced stochasticity, i.e., randomness into the expected utility models (Plous, 1993, p. 83) and Raiffa (1990) emphasise that intransitivities always occur (p. 28, p. 37). Various explanations can be provided for these intransitivities, such as nonstationary or stochastic preferences. However, there is always the possibility that people are not intransitive in their behaviors although they are so in choice situations (Bell, Raiffa, & Tversky, 1988, p. 10).（essay代写)

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