Abstract Hundreds of studies demonstrate human cognitive biases that are both inconsistent with “rational” decision-making and puzzlingly patterned. One such bias, the “endowment effect” (also known as “reluctance to trade”), occurs when people instantly value an item they have just acquired at a much higher price than the maximum they would have paid to acquire it. This bias impedes a vast range of real-world transactions, making it important to understand. Prior studies have documented items that do or do not generate endowment effects, and have noted that the effects vary in magnitude. But none has predicted any of the substantial between-item variation in those magnitudes across a large and novel set of items. Working from evolutionary theory, we derived six factors that predicted 52% of the between-item variation in magnitudes for a novel set of 24 items. These results deepen understanding of both the causes of and patterns in endowment effects. More broadly, they suggest that many other cognitive biases may be similarly approached, and potentially linked by a common theoretical framework.

中文翻译：

---

预测禀赋效应幅度的变化

摘要 数百项研究表明，人类认知偏见既与“理性”决策不一致，又令人费解。其中一种偏差，即“禀赋效应”（也称为“不愿交易”），当人们立即以比他们为获得该物品而支付的最高价格高得多的价格对他们刚获得的物品进行估价时，就会发生这种偏差。这种偏见阻碍了大量现实世界的交易，因此理解这一点很重要。先前的研究已经记录了会或不会产生禀赋效应的项目，并注意到这些效应的大小不同。但是，没有人预测到在大量新颖的项目中这些量级的任何重大项目之间的变化。从进化论工作，我们推导出了 6 个因子，这些因子预测了 24 个新项目的项目间幅度变化的 52%。这些结果加深了对禀赋效应的原因和模式的理解。更广泛地说，他们认为可以类似地处理许多其他认知偏差，并可能通过一个共同的理论框架联系起来。