And it was an empirical chasm as wellthe average selling price (about $2,400) was sepa132 t he h i gh p r i ce of o w n e r s h ip rated by a factor of about 14 from the average buyer's offer (about $175). From a rational perspective, both the ticket holders and the non-ticket holders should have thought of the game in exactly the same way. After all, the anticipated atmosphere at the game and the enjoyment one could expect from the expe rience should not depend on winning a lottery. Then how could a random lottery drawing have changed the students' view of the gameand the value of the ticketsso dramati

O W N E R S H IP PERVADES OUR lives and, in a strange way, shapes many of the things we do. Adam Smith wrote, "Ev ery man [and woman] . . . lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant, and the society itself grows to be what is properly a commercial society." That's an awe some thought. Much of our life story can be told by describ ing the ebb and flow of our particular possessionswhat we get and what we give up. We buy clothes and food, automo biles and homes, for instance. And we sell things as well

Since so much of our lives is dedicated to ownership, wouldn't it be nice to make the best decisions about this? Wouldn't it be nice, for instance, to know exactly how much we would enjoy a new home, a new car, a different sofa, and an Armani suit, so that we could make accurate decisions about owning them? Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. We are mostly fumbling around in the dark. Why? Because of three irrational quirks in our human nature. The first quirk, as we saw in the case of the basketball tickets, is that we fall in love with what we already have. 133 p r e d i c t a b ly i r r a t i o n al Suppose you decide to sell your old VW bus. What do you start doing? Even before you've put a F OR SALE sign in the window, you begin to recall trips you took. You were much younger, of course; the kids hadn't sprouted into teenagers.

A warm glow of remembrance washes over you and the car. This applies not only to VW buses, of course, but to every thing else. And it can happen fast. For instance, two of my friends adopted a child from China and told me this remarkable story. They went to China with 12 other couples. When they reached th orphanage, the director took each of the couples separately into a room and presented them with a daughter. When the couples recon vened the following morning, they all commented on the di rector's wisdom: Somehow she knew exactly which little girl to give to each couple. The matches were perfect. My friends felt the same way, but they also realized that the matches had been random. What made each match seem perfect was not the Chinese woman's talent, but nature's ability to make us instantly attached to what we have. The second quirk is that we focus on what we may lose, rather than what we may gain. When we price our beloved