Temporal distance and the endowment effect

The endowment effect occurs when owners assign more value to the products they own than do non-owners to the same products. Research on the endowment effect has identified factors that enhance or mitigate the effect, such as the duration of ownership, as well as information processing differences between sellers and buyers. However, these studies have primarily involved immediate transactions between sellers and buyers. An interesting question emerges as to whether the endowment effect will be observed for temporally distant transactions.

The main purpose of the first two studies is to examine how the temporal distance from transactions influences customers' evaluations of products by comparing buyers' willingness to pay and sellers' willingness to accept in the present and future. Despite the fact that consumers often collect information today about product or services that will be consumed in the future, such as window shopping or looking at houses or cars for a future purchase, a limited number of endowment studies have considered the temporal effect on willingness to pay and willingness to accept. More specifically, studies 1, 2, and 3 find that the endowment effect disappears as temporal distance from the transaction increases. Study 2 and 3 demonstrates that when the transaction is expected to occur in the near future, sellers focus on their products, while buyers focus on their money. These different cognitive perspectives affect price gaps between sellers and buyers. Specifically study 2 demonstrates that when events are in the distant future, sellers' and buyers' cognitive perspectives change, and the endowment effect is eliminated. In study 3, the effects of role and time on memory trace and information structure were investigate to investigate the salience differences in transaction. Finally, the underlying psychological and temporal mechanism driving the salience differences investigated in study 4-a and 4-b.