Qinyu Xiao

Who they are

The journal page lists Xiao as affiliated with the University of Hong Kong, as it does Feldman, whose own replication work is described on his page on this site. The 2021 paper is the one on which Xiao is first author here, and it belongs to a wider set of preregistered replications of classic decision-making findings.

Key papers

The paper ran two preregistered experiments, with 311 and 316 US participants recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk, to replicate four decision scenarios from the 1988 paper. The bias held in three: budget allocation, investment portfolios and college jobs. It did not hold in the fourth, a choice of wagon colour. The authors discuss explanations for the results from the wider status quo bias literature.

The abstract opens by defining status quo bias as people's general preference to stick to, or continue with, a previously chosen option. It calls the 1988 article the seminal one that provided the first experimental demonstration of the bias, and it names the scenarios replicated: Questions 1, 2, 4 and 6 of the original, which correspond to its Scenarios 1, 3, 4 and 2. The authors report strong empirical support in three of the four, and no substantial support for the wagon colour choice.

Key ideas

The authors discuss explanations for the results from the wider status quo bias literature, among them loss aversion, a bias toward omission and a general preference for the status quo.

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