Earned or eligible?

“We were trying to motivate vets to take advantage of an education employment benefit that they were entitled to after returning to the United States after their time serving in the military overseas. The office of Veterans Affairs had very little budget and could only send one email to veterans to market this program…We changed just one word in the email. Instead of telling vets they were eligible for the program, we reminded them that they had earned it through their years of service.” – Maya Shankar, Inside the Nudge Unit

Another way: a vaccination dose has been reserved for you.

Behavioral scientists call this the endowment effect, all things being equal we value the thing we have more than the alternative.

Cade Massey observed (2018) this in the NFL. One year a team would refuse to trade down, noting the value of a high draft pick, but the next year refuse to trade up, noting the value of multiple lower picks. All things equal is never quite true so the question is how unequal is this case?

The first step to any problem is admission and articulation. We had a derelict iMac on our kitchen desk for a long time. A few times a year the kids played Roblox and sometimes it streamed music. One day I logged in to the Apple trade-in program and discovered it was worth $240. Click, fill, submit the form and three days later a box showed up. Pack, seal, ship. Ten days on I had an Apple gift card. There’s no way I would spend $240 on an old iMac and so trading it in was an easy exchange.

If that was the whole story.

You see, this was the second time I did this. Almost two years early I did the same thing. Click, fill, submit. The box came, I procrastinated and the return, recycle, and reward never came. Why not? The transaction costs.

The endowment effect is a helpful human habit because it shields the owner from transaction costs. Exchanges have middle-men, asymmetric information, ambiguity, and egos. But words like ‘reserved’ and ‘earned’ reduce some of that mental accounting.

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Another way to think about this is to ask is this a compromise or a coin flip??