Alexander L. Brown

Who they are

Brown works in economics. The 2024 paper lists him at Texas A&M University, with his co-authors at Osaka University, Ghent University and the California Institute of Technology.

This page records only what the paper and its published record state. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.

Key papers

Meta-analysis of empirical estimates of loss aversion (2024), with Imai, Vieider and Camerer. The authors gathered 607 estimates of the loss aversion coefficient from 150 articles in economics, psychology, neuroscience and other fields, published between 1992 and 2017. They estimated the mean coefficient at about 1.96, with the true value very likely lying between 1.8 and 2.1. A coefficient of one would mean losses and gains weigh the same; two would mean a loss weighs twice as much as an equal gain.

In the working version of the paper, more than nine in ten of the estimates were above one, but individual estimates ranged from close to zero to above twenty. The authors also recorded features of each study's design and found that few of them made much difference to the average. The analysis deliberately excluded studies in which people buy and sell objects, the setting of the classic endowment effect experiments, so its estimate applies to choices involving risk.

Key ideas

The paper's contribution is a number with its spread attached. It supports the long-standing claim that losses weigh roughly twice as much as gains on average, and it shows how far individual studies sit from that average. That makes it useful against two opposite errors: treating loss aversion as absent, and treating "twice as much" as a constant that applies to every person and every decision.

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