Research supported by National Science Foundation Human and Social Dynamics grant (SES 0729244) awarded to Sarah F. Brosnan. All procedures used in the research are in accordance with the Guidelines for the Use of Animals in Research and have been approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee of Georgia State University (IACUC protocol # A07011) and the Zoo Atlanta Scientific Revi...

This paper analyzes systematic variations in market liquidity that arise in standard representative-agent endowment economies. I introduce a natural definition of liquidity that applies whether or not the model supports actual trade in securities. This fundamental endogenous liquidity is driven by the underlying risk dynamics of the economy, and hence does not depend on whatever drives demand f...

The endowment effect is the finding that minimum selling prices for a particular good exceed maximum buying prices. We build on and extend previous research showing that emotions influence the endowment effect, and reveal that the two negatively valenced decision-related emotions, regret and disappointment, have distinct effects on the valuation of an object. We found that an induction of regre...

We consider the problem of reallocating the total initial endowments of an infinitely divisible commodity among agents with single-peaked preferences. With the uniform reallocation rule we propose a solution which satisfies many appealing properties, describing the effect of population and endowment variations on the outcome. The central properties which are studied in this context are populati...

This paper looks at the problem of endowment assurances which do not meet their targets to repay residential mortgages. Through the analysis of the present value of payments under different inflation and interest-rate regimes, we conclude that the perceived problems with endowment policies may simply be a manifestation of "money illusion". Nevertheless, there could frictional problems and other...

We exhibit three non-standard cases of preference reversal (PR) between choices and valuations of bets. The endowment effect arises as a surprising consequence of the WTA/WTP disparity when the probabilities of winning get close to certainty. We consider a new theory of choice under risk, cognitive consistency (CC) theory, which can predict both standard and non-standard cases of PR, the WTA/WT...

Agents and endowments. There is a continuum of ex ante identical households, a large number of perfectly competitive financial intermediaries, and a government. As in a typical cash-inadvance economy each household splits into a worker and a shopper each period. Each period each household receives an idiosyncratic endowment y ∈ [0,∞) that is IID in the population and IID over time with density ...

This paper develops, using the revealed preference approach, a model of choice with an initial endowment and in the presence of alternatives that are grouped into categories. Our model generalizes the classical individual choice model which is rationalized by utility maximization, and reduces to that model in the absence of an initial endowment. Given an exogenous endowment, our decision maker ...