No Endowment Effect when People Transact Secondhand Goods over the Internet

We set up a field experiment of the endowment effect by considering thrift shops in Facebook chat rooms and college chat rooms dedicated to secondhand goods transactions. Owners of goods held for use are generally expected to show the endowment effect, but here we show these very owners (most of them females) switch to a trader-like behavior when conducting transactions in the thrift shops and, as a result, the endowment effect vanishes.