The Willingness to Pay–Willingness to Accept Gap, the “Endowment Effect,” Subject Misconceptions, and Experimental Procedures for Eliciting Valuations

We conduct experiments to explore the possibility that subject misconceptions, as opposed to a particular theory of preferences referred to as the “endowment effect,” account for reported gaps between willingness to pay (“WTP”) and willingness to accept (“WTA”). The literature reveals two important facts. First, there is no consensus regarding the nature or robustness of WTP-WTA gaps. Second, while experimenters are careful to control for subject misconceptions, there is no consensus about the fundamental properties of misconceptions or how to avoid them. Instead, by implementing different types of experimental controls, experimenters have revealed notions of how misconceptions arise. Experimenters have…