Derek D. Rucker

Who they are

Rucker works in consumer psychology. The 2018 paper and its working version give his affiliation as Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.

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

Key papers

The loss of loss aversion: will it loom larger than its gain? (2018), with Gal. The paper reviews the evidence offered for loss aversion, the principle that losses loom larger than gains, and concludes that "current evidence does not support that losses, on balance, tend to be any more impactful than gains". It then asks why loss aversion remains widely accepted as a general principle among social scientists, including consumer psychologists, and links that persistence to ideas about how beliefs take hold in science. Its final part argues that a more contextual view of when losses outweigh gains would open new questions for consumer research.

Key ideas

The paper targets the claim that loss aversion is general, not the observation that people sometimes weigh losses more heavily. Its proposal is to study the conditions under which losses matter more, matter equally or matter less.

Later work answered it in two ways. Kellen Mrkva and colleagues found in 2020, across 17,720 people, that loss aversion varied with knowledge, experience and age but was present at every level of knowledge. Alexander L. Brown and colleagues' 2024 meta-analysis of 607 estimates from risky choices put the average coefficient between 1.8 and 2.1, with very wide variation between studies. Read alongside the 2018 paper, these results describe an asymmetry that is common on average and far from constant.

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