Endowment Bias and our wives – Interesting paradox

I have been besieged with increasing demand from my fans ( Fan club of two people - My pet frog and my pet rock) to start writing on the blog again. So here goes …

I m sure most of you have read about endowment bias on multiple blogs. Prof Bakshi has written on it and so have my friends Rohit and Neeraj commented on it.

Endowment bias or effect is the phenomenon where people start valuing something more after they own it. It is the effect where people would demand a considerable higher price for a product that they own as opposed to what they would be prepared to pay for it before they own it.

A practical example is that people will always expect a higher amount for their home when they are selling as compared to what the prevalent market rate. In case of the house part of the value ascribed comes from the effort put in over the years in converting the house to a home at a emotional level. The buyer of course has no such emotional attachment to the house. A car once purchased, miraculously seems to better features than the neighbours car and so does our television or tablet etc

Endowment bias seeps into our stockpicking when suddenly the company we buy transforms from a ugly duckling into a white swan. It begins to look very precious with great business opportunity, great management, ability to increase marketshare, ability to increase margins etc. This flaw also plays out in our decision to sell the business when we always perceive it to be more valuable than what the market is willing to pay for it.

The paradox of course is that we suddenly don’t find our wives more beautiful or more precious after we marry them ( hopefully my wife is not reading this). I haven’t encountered men (even women) paying glowing tributes to their spouses like saying “ How good a cook my wife is or how beautiful/ intelligent she is or how caring my husband is etc

One way of looking at the paradox is that we really don’t own our wives :-). A lovely song by the Beatles called the “Norwegian Wood” comes to my mind immediately

“I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me …"