源于“反常”终于“常理”的禀赋效应

如果忽略收入影响和交易成本, 愿意为一样物品支付的价格应等于愿意出售的价格。而塞勒教授却发现, 现实生活中有一些“反常”现象, 个体会对自己所拥有的物品赋予更高的价值, 造成“愿意支付价格”和“愿意出售价格”的不一致。塞勒利用预期理论中的损失厌恶对这些反常现象进行解释, 并将该现象称为禀赋效应(endowment effect)。此后, 众多研究者从不同角度对该效应进行了探索和论证。文章详细梳理了禀赋效应的多种解释机制, 包括损失厌恶、心理所有权理论、偏差的认知过程以及进化的观点等, 论证了禀赋效应符合“常理”的原因, 同时也探讨了禀赋效应在商业销售策略和政府拆迁政策等方面的应用前景。

Normality rather than anomaly: The theory and application of endowment effect

If the influence of income and trade cost were neglected, it is natural that people are willing to pay the same for something as they would require when sell it. However, Prof. Thaler discovered that it is not always the truth. It happens in daily life that individuals attach higher value to the things they own and thus their willingness to pay and willingness to sell for the very item may differ. Enlightened by the prospect theory, Thaler explained this anomaly by loss aversion and named it endowment effect. Following him, many researchers have made further exploration and argument from various angles. In this paper, we summarized previous work about endowment effect and list different explanations including loss aversion theory, psychological ownership theory, biased cognitive processing theory and evolution theory. This paper elaborated the interrelationship and disputes among the theories and finally gave the reason why endowment effect is not abnormal. Meanwhile, endowment effect plays an important role in guiding government work as well as business strategy making. Future research should enrich the theory framework, expand applications and strengthen the research in Chinese background.