We study the endowment effect and expectation-based reference points in the field leveraging the setup of the Socio-Economic Panel. Households receive a small item for taking part in the panel, and we randomly assign respondents either a towel or a notebook, which they can exchange at the end of...

Evidence suggests that participants in direct student-proposing deferred-acceptance mechanisms (DA) play dominated strategies. To explain the data, we introduce expectation-based loss aversion into a school-choice setting and characterize choice-acclimating personal equilibria in DA. We find...

Extensive evidence suggests that participants in the direct student-proposing deferred-acceptance mechanism (DSPDA) play dominated strategies. In particular, students with low priority tend to misrepresent their preferences for popular schools. To explain the observed data, we introduce...

Product lotteries are a sales strategy where companies hide features of differentiated products from consumers until the purchase is complete. I identify loss aversion as an important factor explaining the existence of vertical product lotteries. I consider a profit-maximizing monopolist serving...

Do laboratory experiments provide a reliable basis for measuring field preferences? Economists recognize that preferences can differ across individuals, but only a few attempts have been made to elicit individual preferences for representative samples of a population in a particular geographical...

Deferred Acceptance (DA), a widely implemented algorithm, is meant to improve allocations: under classical preferences, it induces preference-concordant rankings. However, recent evidence shows that—in both real, large-stakes applications and experiments—participants frequently play...