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FIELD EXPERIMENTS ON THE ANCHORING OF ECONOMIC VALUATIONS
Author(s) -
Alevy Jonathan E.,
Landry Craig E.,
List John A.
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
economic inquiry
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.823
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1465-7295
pISSN - 0095-2583
DOI - 10.1111/ecin.12201
Subject(s) - anchoring , economics , valuation (finance) , pillar , microeconomics , econometrics , field (mathematics) , psychology , social psychology , mathematics , engineering , pure mathematics , structural engineering , finance
A pillar of behavioral research is that preferences are constructed during the process of choice. A prominent finding is that uninformative numerical “anchors” influence judgment and valuation. It remains unclear whether such processes influence market equilibria. We conduct two experiments that extend the study of anchoring to field settings. The first experiment produces evidence that some consumers' valuations can be anchored in novel situations; there is no evidence that experienced agents are influenced by anchors. The second experiment finds that anchors have only transient effects on market outcomes that converge to equilibrium predictions after a few market periods . ( JEL C93 , D11 )