- Photo
- —
- Name
- —
- Field
- Behavioral economics
- Year
- 1979
- Author(s)
- Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky
- Core idea
- People value gains and losses asymmetrically, evaluate outcomes relative to a reference point, and overweight low probabilities.
- Why I care
- Any time someone asks why users won’t switch to our clearly better thing, I mentally pull up this paper; it explains loss aversion and status quo bias better than any slide I’ve ever made.
- Great for
- Pricing changes, migration plans, churn prevention, and messaging around “upgrade” flows instead of hard switches.
- Key concept to Google
- Value function and loss aversion in prospect theory
- Difficulty
- Medium—mathy in spots but the intuition is gold once you push through.
TheLysts
