Why you overpaid at that online auction
The Indicator from Planet Money
NPR
4.7 • 9.2K Ratings
🗓️ 17 November 2025
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ever put in the winning bid for something on an auction site only to realize you significantly overpaid? Yeah, there’s a phrase for that. On today’s show: the winner’s curse.
Richard Thaler’s new book with Alex O. Imas is The Winner’s Curse: Behavioral Economics Anomalies, Then and Now.
Read Planet Money’s newsletter on the winner’s curse.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | NPR. |
| 0:02.0 | This is the indicator from planet money. |
| 0:13.5 | I'm Jerry Woods here with Greg Rizzelski all the way from planet money. |
| 0:17.0 | That's right. |
| 0:18.0 | Meet a long trip all the way from a different planet. |
| 0:20.0 | Greg, I held a bit of a behavioral |
| 0:22.3 | economics experiment the other day. I'm recording, testing. I can't hear my... I got the whole |
| 0:27.7 | indicator team together. Or should we... Let me go find a writing implement. And I auctioned off a jar of |
| 0:33.2 | coins. Can you see that? They look like quarters. |
| 0:38.1 | If you're an econ nerd, you might have heard of this game. |
| 0:41.5 | It's like a kind of a famous behavioral economics game. |
| 0:44.8 | So basically, like, you don't tell people how much money is in the jar. |
| 0:50.1 | Then people have to place bids. |
| 0:52.1 | And the highest bidder wins the jar of coins. Yeah, that's right. And those bids were binding. The colleague who bid the highest would need to actually pay me. But, you know, in return, they get that jar of coins. Okay, I'm going to hand it to Cooper. He can have a look. All right. Give it a good shake. |
| 1:11.3 | You can rip down your bids. This is your only opportunity. There's no more opportunity. |
| 1:15.4 | No take back. I'm so bad at these. How many things are in the jar games? |
| 1:18.5 | This is my laundry dream. Okay. Three. Yeah, build some tension. Two, one. Submit. |
| 1:25.5 | $5. $7.25. Corey Bridges, you are the winner. $5.25. $7.75. |
| 1:28.3 | Corey Bridges, you are the winner. |
| 1:31.3 | $9.25. Congratulations. |
| 1:33.3 | Was it exactly $9.25? |
| 1:36.3 | The actual value is $8. |
... |
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