No Deals on Wheels: A Price-Dispersion Model of the Endowment Effect in the Used-Car Marketplace

The used-car marketplace has erupted over the last 3 years as a byproduct of the COVID-19 pandemic, with prices becoming more diffuse and rising at unprecedented rates. Although these prices were quick to rise, they appear incredibly slow to fall. A possible factor for this result is the endowment effect, which suggests that sellers may be listing their cars at high prices that buyers are unwilling to pay. We employ a salience-based model of the endowment effect and propose that greater price dispersion will widen the gap between WTA and WTP. We employ an online lab experiment using a footwear resell marketplace and provide evidence that this result indeed occurs. Interestingly, a follow-up experiment that utilizes a greater currency denomination reveals that increasing nominal price dispersion while preserving real dispersion may accentuate the results from our main experiment. Through these experiments, we offer a novel finding -- high-dispersion products have a greater WTA-WTP gap than low-dispersion products. We apply this finding into a large scale observational study to investigate the presence of the endowment effect in the used-car marketplace. Through an adaptation of Genesove and Mayer's (2001) regression methodology, we find evidence that the price-dispersion model of the endowment effect indeed exists and its impact persists both before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Our estimates for the endowment effect and its magnitude are robust to different definitions of our price-dispersion term. We conclude with offering explicit pathways for future research that will be possible with a richer dataset.