Chimpanzees and Economics

So after watching the video in class, I decided to do some investigating into the use of chimps in economics experiments. It’s amazing to me the fact that economists are using chimpanzees to study economics and relate it to humans. I guess it shouldn’t be too surprising since chimpanzees are our closest relatives, but there are vast differences between the two species. For starters humans don’t groom each other and snack on what they find.
One of the most basic aspects of economics is bartering, which is what researchers are training the chimpanzees to do. Chimpanzees were taught to trade tokens for valuable commodities such as grapes, kind of like how humans use money to buy things we like. But researchers are studying chimpanzees to learn more about humans than just how we barter.
One similarity I have come across is the endowment effect. Both humans and chimps seem to favor objects they were just received over objects that they would usually prefer that they could get through an exchange. Primatologists have run experiments to test this effect on chimps by using peanut butter sticks and frozen juice bars. The preference for peanut butter and juice bars was half and half regularly, but when they were endowed with the peanut butter, 80% of the chimps chose to keep it instead of exchanging it for a juice bar. A similar test was run on humans using coffee mugs and chocolate bars; they also preferred to keep what they were given over exchanging to meet the expected preferences.
You may be wondering why the endowment effect is important, well for a long time economists believed that this effect was a fluke because it meant that humans might not be as rational as we thought. But since this has also been discovered in primates, the only rational conclusion, according to an article from The Economist, is that humans are irrational animals.

"The endowment effect | It’s mine, I tell you | The Economist." Economist.com. 2 Mar. 2009 .

"What chimpanzees can teach us about economics." PhysOrg.com | Science News | Technology | Physics | Nanotechnology | Space Science | Earth Science | Medicine. 2 Mar. 2009 .

"Why Don't Chimpanzees Like To Barter Food?" Science Daily: News & Articles in Science, Health, Environment & Technology. 2 Mar. 2009 .