William F. Samuelson

Who they are

Samuelson is listed by Boston University's Questrom School of Business as Professor Emeritus in its Markets, Public Policy, and Law group. He took his B.A. at Harvard College in 1974 and his Ph.D. in economics at Harvard in 1978, and then joined the Boston University faculty. His faculty profile names game theory, auctions, bargaining, microeconomics and experimental economics as research interests, and records that he serves on the editorial boards of Group Decisions and Negotiation and the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

He is a co-author of the textbook Managerial Economics (Wiley, 2021) with S. Marks and J. Zagorsky, and of a 1992 Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control paper on labor supply flexibility and portfolio choice with Z. Bodie and R. Merton. The school lists a 1996 Executive MBA Teaching Award among his honours.

Key papers

The 1988 paper in the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty reports a series of decision experiments and data on faculty choices of health plans and retirement programs. Its abstract says individuals disproportionately stick with the status quo, and that the bias is substantial in important real decisions. It also notes that economics, psychology and decision theory each offer possible explanations. The 1983 paper with Bazerman, in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, is covered on this site under the winner's curse.

Key ideas

The 1988 paper introduced the name status quo bias and reports decision experiments and data on faculty choices of health plans and retirement programs. Later work proposed loss aversion, a bias toward omission and a general preference for the status quo as explanations. A 2021 preregistered replication by Qinyu Xiao and colleagues reported the bias in three of four scenarios taken from the paper. The article What is status quo bias? follows that argument.

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