[fizzbizz]

I disagree.

If you come by and swipe a quarter off my desk, I'm going to be way more pissed than if you came by my desk and left a quarter.

The delta of my being pissed is way bigger than the DMU of +/- $.25, or my feeling if I'd parted ways with that $.25 in a variety of other manners.

I don't know if what I'm experiencing is or isn't "loss aversion". But it's not "just DMU".

This is an important distinction. In my experience, people equate "loss aversion" with "unwilling departure of money" and "windfall" -- i.e. being unwilling to be swindled or ripped off.

[devinhelton]

I don't think your anger is a result of loss aversion, but rather the fact that someone committed predation upon you.

Civilization depends on an equilibrium where I don't steal your property, and you do not steal mine. Civilization flourishes when everyone is in the cooperate-cooperate quadrant of the prisoner's dilemma. When someone steals from you, they have violated this very basic principle. If you accept this defection without responding, then they will likely only defect more in the future. Thus maintaining the equilibrium requires you to respond harshly to even small defections.

[betenoire]

yeah... but all the examples in the article involved "magically appearing money". How does that fit into our understanding of civilization?

[ikurei]

We use thought experiments about magically appearing money, but the aim would be to later try to apply those ideas to more realistic cases of, for instance, risk-taking.

[devinhelton]

I was responding to fizzbizz, not the original article.