Trade

"When you look at human history, modern concepts like money, contracts and even legal systems for enforcing bargains have only existed for a fraction of our existence as social primates," said Jones. "Across evolutionary timescales, exchanging items was very risky because you had no assurances that potential trades would work, and no recourse if they didn't. That's no longer the case, of course, but our brains haven't had time to catch up. There's a mismatch between what they evolved to do and our environment today."MAY 28, 2020 New research on 'endowment effect' points to evolutionary roots of cognitive biases by Liz Entman, Vanderbilt University