Resolving Differences in Willingness to Pay and Willingness to Accept: Reply

Gwendolyn C. Morrison (1997) raises a logical point regarding our experimental test of the divergence between willingness to pay (WTP) and willingness to accept (WTA) measures of economic value (Shogren et al., 1994). She argues that our design does not provide a true test of the existence of a fundamental endowment effect since we did not control for the potential of a pivoting indifference map (Daniel Kahneman et al., 1990). She concludes that even though our ev- idence shows that the mean WTP and WTA bids for market goods with close substitutes (e.g., candy bars and coffee mugs) converge after market experience, the endowment effect might still be alive and well, albeit at statisti- cally insignificant levels