Heart strings and purse strings: Carryover effects of emotions on economic decisions
Jennifer Lerner, Deborah Small and George Loewenstein examined whether specific emotions affect the endowment effect, the tendency to ask more for an object one owns than one would pay for it. Disgust from an unrelated situation carried over into economic choices, lowering both selling and buying prices and removing the endowment effect. Sadness also carried over but had the opposite effect on buying prices, producing a reverse endowment effect in which buying prices exceeded selling prices. The authors conclude that incidental emotions can shape decisions involving real money and that emotions of the same sign can push decisions in opposite directions.
Jennifer Lerner, Deborah Small and George Loewenstein examined whether specific emotions affect the endowment effect, the tendency to ask more for an object one owns than one would pay for it. Disgust from an unrelated situation carried over into economic choices, lowering both selling and buying prices and removing the endowment effect. Sadness also carried over but had the opposite effect on buying prices, producing a reverse endowment effect in which buying prices exceeded selling prices. The authors conclude that incidental emotions can shape decisions involving real money and that emotions of the same sign can push decisions in opposite directions.
Written from the abstract read 2026-10-22 via a university repository record.
What our sources record
Recorded when this source was checked, figures included, with page references and quotation marks removed.
Lerner, J. S., Small, D. A., & Loewenstein, G. (2004). Heart strings and purse strings: Carryover effects of emotions on economic decisions. Psychological Science, 15(5), 337-341. doi:10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00679.x.