The instant a mug is yours, you value it roughly twice as much

Daniel Kahneman, Jack Knetsch and Richard Thaler randomly handed out coffee mugs, then asked owners how much they'd sell for and non-owners how much they'd pay. Owners demanded roughly double what buyers offered for the identical mug — simply owning something, even for a few minutes, makes giving it up feel like a loss.

— Daniel Kahneman, Jack L. Knetsch & Richard Thaler, Experimental Tests of the Endowment Effect and the Coase Theorem — Journal of Political Economy, 1990

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