The endowment effect is a well-documented decision phenomenon, referring to a tendency that people price a commodity higher when selling it than when buying it. This phenomenon can be interpreted as a sort of inertia, an unwillingness to make a change, or in other words an attachment to the status-quo. People with autism dislike social interaction, and are thus probably less willing to buy and sell items and more attached to the status quo. Previous research revealed that T-carriers of a single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) of the dopamine beta-hydroxylase (DBH) gene, rs1611115 (C-1021T), are associated with autism and difficulty in social interaction. Therefore, rs1611115 may modulate the endowment effect. In the current study, the subjects sold and bought lotteries with various probabilities of winning money and provided saliva for genotyping. We found that T-carriers (people of CT genotype in this study) exhibited greater endowment effects compared to people of CC genotype. We discuss another two possible explanations of our results: empathy and loss aversion. This is the first attempt to research the endowment effect from the perspective of genes. The result indicates that an SNP of genes (an innate factor) can exert an observable effect on human market activities.

We compare and critique two measures of risk perception. We suggest that a single question — “How risky is the situation?” — captures the concept of risk perception more accurately than the multiple-item measure used by Sitkin and Weingart (1995). In fact, this latter measure inadvertently captures notions of attractiveness or expected return, rather than risk perception. We further propose that the error underlying the construction of Sitkin and Weingart’s measure is explained in terms of a top-down model of risk perception, in which perceived risk and perceived return are consequences, rather than determinants, of attractiveness. Two studies compare the validity of the two alternative measures.

This target article is concerned with the implications of the surprisingly different experimental practices in economics and in areas of psychology relevant to both economists and psychologists, such as behavioral decision making. We consider four features of experimentation in economics, namely, script enactment, repeated trials, performance-based monetary payments, and the proscription against deception, and compare them to experimental practices in psychology, primarily in the area of behavioral decision making. Whereas economists bring a precisely defined “script” to experiments for participants to enact, psychologists often do not provide such a script, leaving participants to infer what choices the situation affords. By often using repeated experimental trials, economists allow participants to learn about the task and the environment; psychologists typically do not. Economists generally pay participants on the basis of clearly defined performance criteria; psychologists usually pay a flat fee or grant a fixed amount of course credit. Economists virtually never deceive participants; psychologists, especially in some areas of inquiry, often do. We argue that experimental standards in economics are regulatory in that they allow for little variation between the experimental practices of individual researchers. The experimental standards in psychology, by contrast, are comparatively laissez-faire. We believe that the wider range of experimental practices in psychology reflects a lack of procedural regularity that may contribute to the variability of empirical findings in the research fields under consideration. We conclude with a call for more research on the consequences of methodological preferences, such as the use on monetary payments, and propose a “do-it-both-ways” rule regarding the enactment of scripts, repetition of trials, and performance-based monetary payments. We also argue, on pragmatic grounds, that the default practice should be not to deceive participants.