Plantinga Arnoud, Krijnen Job M T, Zeelenberg Marcel, Breugelmans Seger M
Department of Social Psychology/TIBER Tilburg University Tilburg The Netherlands.
Anderson School of Management University of California Los Angeles CA USA.
J Behav Decis Mak. 2018 Jan;31(1):65-73. doi: 10.1002/bdm.2041. Epub 2017 Sep 11.
People often neglect opportunity costs: They do not fully take into account forgone alternatives outside of a particular choice set. Several scholars have suggested that poor people should be more likely to spontaneously consider opportunity costs, because budget constraints should lead to an increased focus on trade-offs. We did not find support for this hypothesis in five high-powered experiments (total N = 2325). The experiments used different products (both material and experiential) with both high and low prices (from $8.50 to $249.99) and different methods of reminding participants of opportunity costs. High-income and low-income participants showed an equally strong decrease in willingness to buy when reminded of opportunity costs, implying that both the rich and the poor neglect opportunity costs.
他们没有充分考虑特定选择集之外被放弃的其他选择。几位学者认为，穷人应该更有可能自发地考虑机会成本，因为预算限制会使人们更关注权衡取舍。但在五项大规模实验（总样本量N = 2325）中，我们并未找到支持这一假设的证据。这些实验使用了不同的产品（包括物质产品和体验产品），价格有高有低（从8.50美元到249.99美元），并采用了不同的方法来提醒参与者注意机会成本。当被提醒机会成本时，高收入和低收入参与者的购买意愿均出现了同样显著的下降，这意味着富人和穷人都会忽视机会成本。
