Loss aversion is not robust: A re-meta-analysis

Abstract

There is an ongoing debate in the literature about the existence and boundary conditions of loss aversion. In a recent paper Brown et al. (2024) meta-analyzed the literature on empirical estimates of loss aversion, spanning thirty years, and reported strong loss aversion across studies. Here, we re-meta-analyzed their dataset, dividing studies into those with asymmetric gains and losses (typically smaller losses than gains) versus symmetric gains and losses, and studies where the presentation of gains or losses was ordered by size compared to those with no ordering. This analysis was possible for 84 papers (163 estimates of loss aversion, n = 149,218). The results showed that while the findings of strong loss aversion are replicated when losses are smaller than gains and when gains and losses are presented in an ordered fashion, for studies with symmetric gains and losses and no ordering of items, the loss aversion parameter was approximately 1.07 and not significantly above 1.0, suggesting similar weighting of gains and losses. This casts considerable doubts on the robustness of loss aversion.