How do humans respond to large realized losses?

IF 2.5 2区经济学 Q2 ECONOMICS

Journal of Economic Psychology Pub Date : 2025-02-18 DOI:10.1016/j.joep.2025.102805

Redzo Mujcic , Nattavudh Powdthavee

{"title":"How do humans respond to large realized losses?","authors":"Redzo Mujcic , Nattavudh Powdthavee","doi":"10.1016/j.joep.2025.102805","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In a controlled field setting, in which the majority of people in our sample lose more than £90,000, we examine how human beings respond to major financial losses. University ethics boards would not allow this kind of huge-loss phenomenon to be studied with normal social-science experiments. Yet the scientific and practical issues at stake are unusually important ones. In the analyzed gameshow setting, individuals are handed £100,000 in cash. They then have to make risky decisions. Facing a sequence of seven questions, individuals are required to distribute their cash endowment over a set of possible answers. Participants lose any cash placed on a wrong answer. In a sample of British participants, we find that people become increasingly more cautious as they lose more of their cash endowment. A realized prior loss of £75,000 or more increases the propensity to fully diversify by 50 percentage points compared to a prior loss of £25,000. We find a similar cautious response in a smaller sample of US participants when the stakes are raised to $1 million US dollars. Our study appears to be the first to be able to calculate systematically how human beings react to large and unrecoverable financial losses.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48318,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Psychology","volume":"107 ","pages":"Article 102805"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5000,"publicationDate":"2025-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Economic Psychology","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167487025000170","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Abstract

In a controlled field setting, in which the majority of people in our sample lose more than £90,000, we examine how human beings respond to major financial losses. University ethics boards would not allow this kind of huge-loss phenomenon to be studied with normal social-science experiments. Yet the scientific and practical issues at stake are unusually important ones. In the analyzed gameshow setting, individuals are handed £100,000 in cash. They then have to make risky decisions. Facing a sequence of seven questions, individuals are required to distribute their cash endowment over a set of possible answers. Participants lose any cash placed on a wrong answer. In a sample of British participants, we find that people become increasingly more cautious as they lose more of their cash endowment. A realized prior loss of £75,000 or more increases the propensity to fully diversify by 50 percentage points compared to a prior loss of £25,000. We find a similar cautious response in a smaller sample of US participants when the stakes are raised to $1 million US dollars. Our study appears to be the first to be able to calculate systematically how human beings react to large and unrecoverable financial losses.

查看原文本刊更多论文

求助全文

约1分钟内获得全文求助全文

来源期刊

Journal of Economic Psychology Multiple-

CiteScore

5.20

自引率

31.40%

发文量

审稿时长

63 days

期刊介绍： The Journal aims to present research that will improve understanding of behavioral, in particular psychological, aspects of economic phenomena and processes. The Journal seeks to be a channel for the increased interest in using behavioral science methods for the study of economic behavior, and so to contribute to better solutions of societal problems, by stimulating new approaches and new theorizing about economic affairs. Economic psychology as a discipline studies the psychological mechanisms that underlie economic behavior. It deals with preferences, judgments, choices, economic interaction, and factors influencing these, as well as the consequences of judgements and decisions for economic processes and phenomena. This includes the impact of economic institutions upon human behavior and well-being. Studies in economic psychology may relate to different levels of aggregation, from the household and the individual consumer to the macro level of whole nations. Economic behavior in connection with inflation, unemployment, taxation, economic development, as well as consumer information and economic behavior in the market place are thus among the fields of interest. The journal also encourages submissions dealing with social interaction in economic contexts, like bargaining, negotiation, or group decision-making. The Journal of Economic Psychology contains: (a) novel reports of empirical (including: experimental) research on economic behavior; (b) replications studies; (c) assessments of the state of the art in economic psychology; (d) articles providing a theoretical perspective or a frame of reference for the study of economic behavior; (e) articles explaining the implications of theoretical developments for practical applications; (f) book reviews; (g) announcements of meetings, conferences and seminars.