The mere ownership effect is the observation that people who own a good tend to evaluate it more positively than people who do not. It is typically demonstrated in a paradigm in which some participants in an experiment are randomly assigned to own a good ("owners") by receiving it for free. Other participants are randomly assigned to simply evaluate the same good without receiving it. Participants who own the good typically rate it as more attractive or as liking it more than do participants who do not own it. It is not necessary to actually own a good to exhibit the mere ownership effect. Simply touching or imagining that one owns a good is enough to instantiate the mere ownership effect. The mere ownership effect is often used as a case in which people show the

endowment effect In psychology and behavioral economics, the endowment effect (also known as divestiture aversion and related to the mere ownership effect in social psychology) is the finding that people are more likely to retain an object they own than acquire t ...

that cannot be parsimoniously explained by

loss aversion Loss aversion is the tendency to prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains. The principle is prominent in the domain of economics. What distinguishes loss aversion from risk aversion is that the utility of a monetary payoff depends o ...

Origins

Two routes have been proposed to explain the mere ownership effect. Both rely on the association of a good with the self. ;Attachment theory: One set of theorists believe that these self-associations take the form of an emotional attachment to the good. Once an attachment has formed, the potential loss of the good is perceived as a threat to the self. ;Self-referential memory theory: Another set of theorists believe that ownership increases the perceived value of a good through a self-referential memory effect (SRE) – the better

encoding In communications and information processing, code is a system of rules to convert information—such as a letter, word, sound, image, or gesture—into another form, sometimes shortened or secret, for communication through a communication ...

and

recollection Recall in memory refers to the mental process of retrieval of information from the past. Along with encoding and storage, it is one of the three core processes of memory. There are three main types of recall: free recall, cued recall and serial ...

of stimuli associated with the self-concept.{{Cite journal, last=Symons, first=Cynthia S., last2=Johnson, first2=Blair T., title=The self-reference effect in memory: A meta-analysis., journal=Psychological Bulletin, volume=121, issue=3, pages=371–394, doi=10.1037/0033-2909.121.3.371, pmid=9136641, date=May 1997, url=http://opencommons.uconn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=chip_docs Attributes of a good may be more

accessible Accessibility is the design of products, devices, services, vehicles, or environments so as to be usable by people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design and practice of accessible development ensures both "direct access" (i. ...

to its owners than are other attributes of the transaction. Because most goods have more positive than negative features, this accessibility bias should result in owners more positively evaluating their goods than do non-owners.

References

Social psychology