Page 133 - Hard Goals

124 HARD Goals

and Daniel Kahneman, it basically says that people place a
higher value on objects they own than on objects they do not
own. For example, let’s say you owned a plain red ceramic cof-
fee mug and I wanted to buy it from you. There’s a good chance,
following a number of actual experiments on this topic, you
would say to me, “I won’t sell this mug of mine for less than
$7.” However, if you went into a store to buy the same exact
coffee mug, there’s a good chance you wouldn’t pay more than
$3 for it. How do you explain the discrepancy? We value things
that we own more than things we don’t yet own.
One of my favorite experiments on this topic involved pizza
(and you already know about my heartfelt connection to pizza).
Irwin Levin, from the University of Iowa, and Marco Lauriola,
from the University of Rome “La Sapienza” in Italy, wanted to
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see how the endowment effect impacted the purchase of pizza.
College students in Iowa and Italy were given the task of build-
ing their own pizza by selecting from a menu of 12 ingredients
(if all experiments were like this, I’d make my next career being
a permanent research subject).
In the America version, the students were divided into two
groups: an Adding Condition or a Subtracting Condition. In
the Adding Condition, subjects started with a description of a
“basic” cheese pizza with no extra ingredients and were asked
to select additional toppings like mushrooms, peppers, pineap-
ple, pepperoni, and so forth for 50 cents each. In the Subtract-
ing Condition, subjects started with a “super” pizza with all
12 ingredients and were told that the price would be reduced
by 50 cents for each topping they subtracted. Both groups were
told that they should add or delete as many ingredients as they
wanted until they got their preferred pizza. The Italian version