Previous work comparing pricing decisions by buyers and sellers has primarily focused on the endowment effect, the phenomenon that selling prices exceed buying prices. Here, we examine whether pricing decisions by buyers and sellers also vary in sensitivity to differences between objects' expected values (EVs). Both a loss-aversion account (which posits that losses are weighted more heavily than gains) and a lossattention account (which posits increased attention to a task when it involves possible losses) predict that pricing decisions by sellers should exhibit higher sensitivity. The latter, however, additionally predicts that this pattern should only emerge under certain conditions. In studies 1 and 2, we reanalyzed two published datasets in which participants priced monetary lotteries as sellers or buyers. It emerged that sellers showed greater EV sensitivity (defined as the rank correlation between the set price for each lottery and its EV) except in a condition with an extended deliberation time of 15 seconds. In study 3, the buyer-seller difference in EV sensitivity was replicated even when the pricing task was presented repeatedly, while in study 4, it was eliminated when buying and selling trials were randomly mixed. The reduction of the "seller's sense" in long deliberation and mixed trials settings supports an attentional resource-based account of the differences between sellers and buyers in their EV sensitivity.

This research provides evidence regarding the causal effect of group conformity on task performance in stable and variable environments. Drawing on studies in cultural evolution, social learning, and social psychology, we experimentally tested the hypotheses that conformity improves group performance in a stable environment (H1) and decreases performance (by hindering adaptability) in a temporally variable environment (H2). We compare the performance of individuals, low conformity groups, and high conformity groups in a four-arm randomized lab experiment (N = 240). High conformity was manipulated by rewarding agreement with the group’s majority and imposing a cost on disagreement. The monetary implications of conformity impaired performance in a variable environment but did not have a significant effect on performance in the stable environment. Intragroup individual-level analyses provide insights into the mechanisms that account for the group-level results by showing that lower conformity in groups facilitates efficient adaptability in the use of social information.

No abstract