For those readers interested in behavioral law and economics stuff, here's a nice link - full with follow-up links - to a piece by Dave Hoffman (The Endowment Effect and Legal Policy (Highly Wonky Post)) over at Concurring Opinions about the endowment effect. Hoffman touches on
the deep problem here of experimental theory. We want to predict how naive buyers and sellers will act outside of the lab in response to endowment with real goods (from my perspective, the important questions concern legal goods). Experiments are always imperfect reflections of this real market, with controls that hopefully don’t seriously undermine the likelihood of external validity.
This problem isn't limited to the endowment effect, but cuts across the BL&E field and is one reason why skeptics of the BL&E research aren't very forthcoming in accepting its findings; I touched upon this 'caveat' in no. 3.2.1 and 4.3 of my recent piece about the core notion 'responsibility' in corporate governance.
For additional material on the endowment effect check post No. 146.
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