The Effect of Regulatory Focus on Estimating Value of Unfamiliar Currency Owned by Self or Others

Abstract

Because of self-enhancement motives, when involved in social comparison, many people generally value things that are related to themselves, with the representative example being possessions, which is known as the endowment (ownership) effect. However, there are times when someone else's possessions appear to be better than our own, even if they are the same things, which is known as the endowment effect reversal. The purpose of this study was to explore the moderating variable that regulates the endowment effect and the endowment effect reversal by confirming whether the value estimation of others' belongings differed through a regulatory focus as it was surmised that the regulatory focus would moderate the endowment effect of the self versus the others' ownership. Foreign participants were shown the currency of a country they were unfamiliar with and asked to estimate the value in their home country currency. It was found that when people thought the money was their own, people with a promotion focus estimated the value to be higher than people with a prevention focus. However, when they thought it was someone else's money, the regulatory focus moderating effect was not found to be significant, which suggested that the endowment effect may be strengthened or eliminated depending on the individual's regulatory focus. Based on these study results, the implications, limitations, and suggestions for follow-up studies are discussed.