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The effect of performance-based incentives on judgment biases is a controversial issue. A recent extensive meta-analysis of Brañas-Garza et al. (2019, https://doi.

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Loss aversion, the argument that losses are given more weight than gains, has been recently shown to be absent in small losses. However, a series of studies by Mrkva et al. (2020) appear to demonstrate the existence of loss aversion even for smaller losses. We re-ran Mrkva et al.’s decision tasks after removing features of the task that differentiated losses from the gains, particularly asymmetries in sizes of gains and losses, an increasing order of losses, and status quo effects. The results show that we replicate Mrkva et al.’s (2020) findings in their original paradigm with online participants, yet in five studies where gains and losses were symmetrically presented in random order (n = 2,001), we find no loss aversion for small amounts, with loss aversion surfacing very weakly only for average losses of $40 (mean λ = 1.16). We do find loss aversion for higher amounts such as $100 (mean λ = 1.54) though it is not as extreme as previously reported. Furthermore, we find weak correlation between the endowment effect and loss aversion, with the former effect existing simultaneously with no loss aversion. Thus, when items are presented symmetrically, significant loss aversion emerges only for large losses, suggesting that it cannot be argued that (all) “losses loom larger than gains.”

The conjunction fallacy is a classical judgment bias that was argued to be insusceptible to the positive effect of incentivization. We conducted a meta-analysis of the literature (n = 3,276) and found that although most studies did not report a significant effect of incentivization, the results across studies show a significant positive effect for incentivization, d = 0.19, with an odds ratio of 1.40 for answering correctly when incentivized. The effect was relatively smaller when examining absolute differences in the probability of correct judgment, implying that it is partly driven by studies with low baseline performance. Additionally, most of the variance between studies was estimated to be due to random noise. These findings join those of other judgment-bias studies to suggest a small but nevertheless robust debiasing effect of incentivization. The findings further suggest cautious interpretation of moderators and null results in light of the extreme variance between individual study results given a small effect size in the population.