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How the Endowment Effect Makes You Overvalue Your Work
Description
In this episode of The Office Politics Podcast, Lucas and Luna explore the endowment effect—a cognitive bias where we overvalue what we already own—and how it plays out in the workplace. Lucas explains a study by Nobel laureate Richard Thaler where Cornell students valued a mug they owned at nearly double the price of non-owners. They discuss how this bias affects everything from salary negotiations (why you overvalue your current project) to team dynamics (why people cling to their own ideas). Luna shares a story about a colleague who fought to keep her broken process, and Lucas offers practical tactics: benchmarking against market data, playing devil's advocate, and using pre-mortems to detach from ownership. The episode also includes a brief, organic mention of listener support at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo.