ELSEVIER Journal of Economic Psychology 18 (19973 711 712 JOURNAL OF A response to Haan Worthwhile intentions Craig Mackenzie 1 Social Sciences, Bath University, Bath BA2 7A Y, UK I am grateful to Marco Haan (this volume) for helping me to see my pur- pose more clearly. He credits me with the ambition of refuting Thaler's work and dismissing the endowment effect. This was not my purpose. Thaler's achievements are considerable and, as I said (Mackenzie, 1997, p. 134), the endowment effect, and many other effects Thaler has uncovered, seem highly plausible and significant. My purpose was not to undermine Thaler's enter- prise but to extend it by drawing attention to the importance of motives and other intentional concepts (see Dennett, 1987) in the explanation of con- sumer behaviour. Haan's first point is that the endowment effect is a description of the fact that people often value goods in their endowment more highly than other si- milar goods, and not an explanation as I implied. His second point is that while I might be right about wine owners, I do not do justice to the many other experiments performed by Thaler and his colleagues. I would be happy to agree that the endowment effect is simply a descrip- tion, were it not that Thaler consistently brackets the endowment effect with loss aversion. Thaler does not treat the endowment effect as a mere descrip- tion, he also says that it is a 'manifestation' of loss aversion (Kahneman et al., 1991, p. 194). For Thaler, loss aversion is a theory that explains the en- dowment effect. But my paper argued that in cases like wine owning and lawn mowing (Thaler, 1980, p. 43) loss aversion is not a good explanation of the 1 E-mail: c.r.mackenzie@bath.ac.uk. S0167-4870/97/$17.00 © Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PHS01 67-4870(97)00032-9