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294 M. Hoffman et al.
Karpoff’s survey, another dictate of participants’ (and the judges’) property rights
intuitions was who owned the land on which the lost item was found.
Also like animals, our sense of property rights is influenced by who created or
invested in the resource, another uncorrelated asymmetry. In locales that sometimes
grant property rights to squatters—individuals who occupy lands others have pur-
chased—a key determinant of whether the squatters are granted the land is whether
they have invested in it (Cone vs. West Virginia Pulp & Paper Co., 1947; Neuwirth,
2005). Locke also intuited that investment in land is part of what makes it ours:
In Second Treatise on Civil Government (1689), Locke wrote, “everyman has a
property in his person; this nobody has a right to but himself. The labor of his body
and the work of his hand, we may say, are properly his.”
If the Hawk—Dove model underlies our sense of property rights, we would expect
to see psychological mechanisms that motivate us to feel entitled to an object when
we possess it or have invested in it. Here are three such mechanisms, which can be
seen by reinterpreting some well-documented “biases” in the behavioral economics
literature. The first such bias is the endowment effect: We value items more if we are
in possession of them. The endowment effect has been documented in dozens of
experiments, where subjects are randomly given an item (mug, pen, etc.) and
subsequently state that they are willing to sell the mug for much more than those
who were not given the mug are willing to pay (Kahneman, Knetsch, & Thaler,
1990). In the behavioral economics literature, the endowment effect has sometimes
been explained by loss aversion, which is when we are harmed more by a loss than
we benefit from an equivalent gain. However, the source of loss aversion is not
questioned or explained. When it is, loss aversion is also readily explained by the
Hawk—Dove game (Gintis, 2007).
A second bias that also fits the Hawk—Dove model is the IKEA effect: Our valu-
ation of an object is influenced by whether we have developed or built the resource.
The IKEA effect has been documented by asking people how much they would pay
for items like Lego structures or IKEA furniture after randomly being assigned to
build them or receive them pre-built. Subjects are willing to pay more for items they
build themselves.
A third such bias that fits the Hawk—Dove model is the sunk cost fallacy (Mankiw,
2007; Thaler, 1980), which leads us to “throw good money after bad” when we
invest in ventures simply because we have already put so much effort into them,
arguably because our prior efforts lead us to value those ventures more.
Possession and past investment are not the only uncorrelated asymmetries that
can dictate rights. Rights can be dictated by a history of agreements, as happens
when one party sells another deed to a house or car, or, as in our taxicab example,
by whether a service was provided. There are also countless examples in which
rights were determined by perhaps unfair or arbitrary characteristics such as race
and sex: Black Americans were expected to give up their seat for Whites in the Jim
Crow South and women to hand over their earnings or property to their husbands
throughout the ages.
Hawk-—Dove is not just a post hoc explanation for our sense of rights; it also leads
to the following novel insight: We can formally characterize the properties that
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