conchis comments on Post Your Utility Function - Less Wrong

28 Post author: taw 04 June 2009 05:05AM

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Comment author: dclayh 04 June 2009 05:11:22AM *  5 points [-]

thinking "If I had X, would I take Y instead", and "If I had Y, would I take X instead" very often resulted in a pair of "No"s

It's a well-known result that losing something produces roughly twice the disutility that gaining the same thing would produce in utility. (I.e., we "irrationally" prefer what we already have.)

Comment author: conchis 04 June 2009 07:21:05PM *  1 point [-]

It's a well-known result that losing something produces roughly twice the disutility [as] gaining the same thing

This may depend what you mean by (dis)utility. Kermer et al. (one of the alii is Dan Gilbert) argue that "Loss aversion is an affective forecasting error", caused by a tendency to systematically overestimate negative emotional responses.

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