Data showing the effects of a range of different types of anchor on Willingness-to-Pay (WTP) and Willingness-to-Accept (WTA) valuations of familiar consumer products, elicited through individuals’ buying or selling decisions at given prices in incentivized valuation tasks. We focus on four specific dimensions of anchoring: the plausibility of anchor values, the relevance of the anchor task to the valuation task, the subject’s engagement in the anchoring task, and whether the valuation task was one of buying or selling. We find anchoring effects only when the anchor value is framed as a plausible price for the good for which the individual is a potential buyer or seller. Anchoring effects are stronger for WTA than for WTP. We conclude that anchoring effects can affect market behaviour, but that not all anchors are effective. Data are experimental data resulting from an experiment conducted at the Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Science (CBESS) Laboratory at the University of East Anglia in Spring 2011. The ESRC Centre for Competition Policy (CCP) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) undertakes interdisciplinary research into competition policy and regulation that has real-world policy relevance without compromising academic rigour. It prides itself on the interdisciplinary nature of the research and the members are drawn from a range of disciplines, including economics, law, business and political science. The Centre was established in September 2004, building on the pre-existing Centre for Competition and Regulation (CCR), with a grant from the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council).

Data are experimental data resulting from an experiment conducted at the Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Science (CBESS) Laboratory at the University of East Anglia in Spring 2011. Subjects were recruited using a campus-wide online system. There were 228 subjects,108 in the selling treatment and 120 in the buying treatment. The experiment had separate buying and selling treatments, faced by different subjects. The buying treatment elicited WTP valuations for a range of consumption goods and lotteries (trading commodities); the selling treatment elicited WTA valuations for the same commodities. In each treatment, each subject faced eleven tasks in random order, presented on a computer screen. Ten of these tasks had the two-part structure of the canonical design. The first part of such a task was a question that was framed to provide a potential anchor value. Different tasks used different types of anchor, differentiated in terms of plausibility, relevance and engagement. The eleventh task, used as a control, differed from the others in that its first part was a ‘filler’ question with no anchoring significance. The second part of each task elicited the relevant valuation. Further details in documentation.