Evidence of the Endowment Effect in Stock Market Order Placement

Abstract

The psychological endowment effect is apparent when investors place greater value on something when they mentally "own" it than when someone else owns it. Although this effect is well established in laboratory studies, there is relatively little documented evidence of an endowment bias in actual trading. This study examines order placements of stock traders on the Australian Stock Exchange. Consistent with the endowment effect, sellers appear to value their own shares higher than buyers independent of current market price, by consistently placing sell orders on average "further from the market" (i.e., from the best quote) than buy orders. This asymmetry is more pronounced in private client trading than in orders made through institutional brokers, suggesting that more sophisticated investors are less affected by asset ownership than the private clients of retail brokers. Since private "day traders" have been able to trade online themselves rather than through a broker, the quote asymmetry relative to the best-standing quotes between asks and bids has become more pronounced. Over the same period, the relatively small asymmetry apparent in institutional quotes has remained unchanged.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 27 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.