The Irrational Bundle. Dan Ariely

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СКАЧАТЬ tickets from some of the students who had won them—and sell them to those who didn’t. That’s right; we were about to become ticket scalpers.

      THAT NIGHT WE got a list of the students who had won the lottery and those who hadn’t, and we started telephoning. Our first call was to William, a senior majoring in chemistry. William was rather busy. After camping for the previous week, he had a lot of homework and e-mail to catch up on. He was not too happy, either, because after reaching the front of the line, he was still not one of the lucky ones who had won a ticket in the lottery.

      “Hi, William,” I said. “I understand you didn’t get one of the tickets for the final four.”

      “That’s right.”

      “We may be able to sell you a ticket.”

      “Cool.”

      “How much would you be willing to pay for one?”

      “How about a hundred dollars?” he replied.

      “Too low,” I laughed. “You’ll have to go higher.”

      “A hundred fifty?” he offered.

      “You have to do better,” I insisted. “What’s the highest price you’ll pay?”

      William thought for a moment. “A hundred seventy-five.”

      “That’s it?”

      “That’s it. Not a penny more.”

      “OK, you’re on the list. I’ll let you know,” I said. “By the way, how’d you come up with that hundred seventy-five?”

      William said he figured that for $175 he could also watch the game at a sports bar, free, spend some money on beer and food, and still have a lot left over for a few CDs or even some shoes. The game would no doubt be exciting, he said, but at the same time $175 is a lot of money.

      Our next call was to Joseph. After camping out for a week Joseph was also behind on his schoolwork. But he didn’t care—he had won a ticket in the lottery and now, in a few days, he would be watching the Duke players fight for the national title.

      “Hi, Joseph,” I said. “We may have an opportunity for you—to sell your ticket. What’s your minimum price?”

      “I don’t have one.”

      “Everyone has a price,” I replied, giving the comment my best Al Pacino tone.

      His first answer was $3,000.

      “Come on,” I said, “That’s way too much. Be reasonable; you have to offer a lower price.”

      “All right,” he said, “twenty-four hundred.”

      “Are you sure?” I asked.

      “That’s as low as I’ll go.”

      “OK. If I can find a buyer at that price, I’ll give you a call. By the way,” I added, “how did you come up with that price?”

      “Duke basketball is a huge part of my life here,” he said passionately. He then went on to explain that the game would be a defining memory of his time at Duke, an experience that he would pass on to his children and grandchildren. “So how can you put a price on that?” he asked. “Can you put a price on memories?”

      William and Joseph were just two of more than 100 students whom we called. In general, the students who did not own a ticket were willing to pay around $170 for one. The price they were willing to pay, as in William’s case, was tempered by alternative uses for the money (such as spending it in a sports bar for drinks and food). Those who owned a ticket, on the other hand, demanded about $2,400 for it. Like Joseph, they justified their price in terms of the importance of the experience and the lifelong memories it would create.

      What was really surprising, though, was that in all our phone calls, not a single person was willing to sell a ticket at a price that someone else was willing to pay. What did we have? We had a group of students all hungry for a basketball ticket before the lottery drawing; and then, bang—in an instant after the drawing, they were divided into two groups—ticket owners and non–ticket owners. It was an emotional chasm that was formed, between those who now imagined the glory of the game, and those who imagined what else they could buy with the price of the ticket. And it was an empirical chasm as well—the average selling price (about $2,400) was separated by a factor of about 14 from the average buyer’s offer (about $175).

      From a rational perspective, both the ticket holders and the non–ticket holders should have thought of the game in exactly the same way. After all, the anticipated atmosphere at the game and the enjoyment one could expect from the experience should not depend on winning a lottery. Then how could a random lottery drawing have changed the students’ view of the game—and the value of the tickets—so dramatically?

      OWNERSHIP PERVADES OUR lives and, in a strange way, shapes many of the things we do. Adam Smith wrote, “Every man [and woman] . . . lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant, and the society itself grows to be what is properly a commercial society.” That’s an awesome thought. Much of our life story can be told by describing the ebb and flow of our particular possessions—what we get and what we give up. We buy clothes and food, automobiles and homes, for instance. And we sell things as well—homes and cars, and in the course of our careers, our time.

      Since so much of our lives is dedicated to ownership, wouldn’t it be nice to make the best decisions about this? Wouldn’t it be nice, for instance, to know exactly how much we would enjoy a new home, a new car, a different sofa, and an Armani suit, so that we could make accurate decisions about owning them? Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. We are mostly fumbling around in the dark. Why? Because of three irrational quirks in our human nature.

      The first quirk, as we saw in the case of the basketball tickets, is that we fall in love with what we already have. Suppose you decide to sell your old VW bus. What do you start doing? Even before you’ve put a FOR SALE sign in the window, you begin to recall trips you took. You were much younger, of course; the kids hadn’t sprouted into teenagers. A warm glow of remembrance washes over you and the car. This applies not only to VW buses, of course, but to everything else. And it can happen fast.

      For instance, two of my friends adopted a child from China and told me this remarkable story. They went to China with 12 other couples. When they reached the orphanage, the director took each of the couples separately into a room and presented them with a daughter. When the couples reconvened the following morning, they all commented on the director’s wisdom: Somehow she knew exactly which little girl to give to each couple. The matches were perfect. My friends felt the same way, but they also realized that the matches had been random. What made each match seem perfect was not the Chinese woman’s talent, but nature’s ability to make us instantly attached to what we have.

      The second quirk is that we focus on what we may lose, rather than what we may gain. When we price our beloved VW, therefore, we think more about what we will lose (the use of the bus) than what we will gain (money to buy something else). Likewise, the ticket holder focuses on losing the basketball experience, rather than imagining the enjoyment of obtaining money or on what can be purchased with it. Our aversion to loss is a strong emotion, and as I will explain later in the book, one that sometimes causes us to make bad decisions. Do you wonder why we often refuse to sell some of our cherished clutter, and if somebody offers to buy it, we attach an exorbitant price СКАЧАТЬ