This paper analyzes the strategies employed by households in rural China to allocate educational expenditure to children of dierent endowment, examining whether parents use educational funding to reinforce or compensate for variation in endowment. Employing climatic shocks as an instrument for children's endowment yields results indicating that parental expenditure is preferentially directed to...

The endowment effect describes people’s tendency to ask for more money when selling objects than they are willing to pay when buying these objects. Previous research found that Asian participants showed smaller endowment effects than Western participants. These results were explained by culture-specific self-beliefs being transferred onto the endowed object. Yet, Asian self-concepts are not onl...

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This paper revisits the role of skill distributions in trade using a variant of the Heckscher-Ohlin model with multidimensional skill endowment and specialized production organized in teams. The equilibrium is characterized by the “effective endowment”, the part of endowment that is actually utilized in production, which depends on the team matches and the task specialization within teams. It i...

Prior research has consistently demonstrated that people are reluctant to trade a good they own for an alternative good, particularly when the alternative (or “target”) represents a substantial departure from the “endowment”. We demonstrate that the endowment effect can be reduced by first making participants consider trading their endowment for an intermediate alternative (which shares some ch...

The endowment effect describes the fact that people demand much more to give up an object than they are willing to spend to acquire it. The existence of this effect has been documented in numerous experiments. We attempt to explain this effect by showing that evolution favors individuals whose preferences embody an endowment effect. The reason is that an endowment effect improves one’s bargaini...

The price people are willing to pay for a good is often less than the price they are willing to accept to give up the same good, a phenomenon called the endowment effect. Loss aversion has typically accounted for the endowment effect, but an alternative explanation suggests that ownership creates an association between the item and the self, and this possession-self link increases the value of ...

Reports of endowment effects in nonhuman primates have received considerable attention in the comparative literature in recent years. However, little is known about the mechanisms underlying these effects. Continuing to explore endowment effects across different species of primate may reveal subtle differences in behavior that can help formulate specific hypotheses about the relevant mechanisms...