IF YOUR home is cluttered because you cannot bring yourself to throw anything away, do not worry. This attachment to the things we own is fundamental to our survival, according to a team of economists.

The observation that the things we own are more valuable to us than to other people simply because they are ours is widely acknowledged by economists, who call it the “endowment effect”. This holds that people demand more money to give up an object than they are willing to spend to acquire it, and explains why most of us would not swap our favourite sweater, for example, with something of equal value.

Economists are interested in and puzzled by the endowment theory because it goes against classical economic theory of people behaving entirely rationally where money is concerned.

Now, three economics professors think that they have found a Darwinian explanation for why it exists.

According to Steffen Huck, of University College London, Georg Kirchsteiger, of the University Libre de Bruxelles, and Jorg Oechssler, of the University of Heidelberg, our emo- tional attachment to our possessions is “hard-wired” into our brains to help us to survive.

They cite an experiment in which every other student in a class was given a mug bearing their university’s logo. Students who had been given mugs could then sell them to those who had not received one.

They found that sellers demanded much more for the mugs than buyers were willing to pay. In other words, owners seemed to like the mugs more than buyers who did not have one, demonstrating a near- instantaneous endowment effect.

Professor Huck and his colleagues also devised mathematical equations to demonstrate that the downside of having too much of whatever it is you own, be it corn, meat or mugs, is always less significant than the considerable upside of being able to secure a good deal in any bargaining operation.

“From an evolutionary viewpoint, if you can get more of something that’s good for you, such as food, you will be healthier and better off and have more children,” Professor Huck said.

In a hunter-gatherer environment, where people have to swap meat against, say, berries to get a balanced diet, it is advantageous to like the food to which one has immediate access more than what might be reasonable from a purely nutritional view. This is because a preference for the food we already have strengthens our resolve when we are bargaining for other goods, enabling us, on average, to make better deals.

Feigning such a preference is not nearly as effective, the professors say. It follows that those who make better deals end up with more and better resources and are more likely to survive than those who do not, they argue in the Royal Economic Society’s Economic Journal, published today.

“Individuals with a strictly positive endowment effect will never die out in the long run,” the professors say. “An alternative evolutionary explanation for the endowment effect is that if one learns to like what one has, one may spend less costly resources to acquire other goods.”

So next time your partner nags you to clear out the attic, tell them you cannot help it — it is merely Mother Nature at work and you are busy ensuring the survival of the species.

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