Some recent experiments support a claim that the observed differences between willingness to pay and willingness to accept are related to experimental procedures and have nothing to do with preference asymmetries (Plott and Zeiler (2003)) or are eliminated by trading experience (List, 2003). Older people are often presumed to be more conservative and more likely to avoid risk. If this is true, then it would seem natural to expect loss avoidance to be stronger in the older populations. Alternatively, it may be that older people having experienced the loss of many everyday items have learned that such.
