A Test of Competing Explanations of Compensation Demanded

The disparity between willingness-to-pay and willingness-to-accept, also known as compensation demanded, is a robust experimental finding. Two types of explanations been proposed. The first invokes psychological effects, broadly categorized as reference dependence and loss aversion. The second explanation is that there are large substitution effects but that underlying behavior is neoclassically utility-theoretic. The key observation motivating the present study is that loss aversion implies concavity of willingness to accept, whereas the utility-theoretic explanation implies convexity. We report experiments in which subjects were endowed with 3 items and asked the minimum payments they required to be willing to relinquish 1, 2, or 3 of them. We examine whether the compensation demanded is convex, concave, neither, or both in the number of items being relinquished