Your Reclining Airplane Seat Vs. The Lap Behind You: Who Owns the Air Rights?

Your Reclining Airplane Seat Vs. The Lap Behind You: Who Owns the Air Rights? 

"Two law professors conducted an online survey to study the concepts of behavioral economics in relation to the reclining seat debate. 

They asked people to imagine they were taking a six-hour flight from New York to Los Angeles and that the airline implemented a new policy allowing travelers to pay the people in front of them to not recline their seats.

One group was asked to reveal the lowest amount they were willing to accept to give up this feature. 

Another group was asked to reveal the most they were willing to pay to keep the person in front of them from reclining.

The recliners wanted an average of $41 to give up their right to recline, while the “reclinees,” the people who were theoretically sitting behind them, were only willing to pay an average of $18.

This suggests that the space belongs to the recliner, since they seem to value it more. The Economist explains:

According to the theories of Ronald Coase, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1991, the space between airline seats is a scarce resource. Therefore it should not matter who has the initial ownership (assuming there are no barriers to a deal being made). The market will out: whoever values the space more will buy it from the other. (In this case it would normally revert to the recliner.)

But then they flipped the default in another experiment. 

Instead of haggling to give something up, told people they would have to negotiate to get the right to recline in the first place. 

They found that, in this case, recliners were only willing to pay $12 to recline while reclinees didn’t want to sell their legroom for anything less than an average of $39. 

So what gives? 
In this case, it would seem that ownership belongs to the reclinee, who seems to value that legroom more.

The profs point to the work of behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman to explain the discrepancy: "People generally don’t like losing things that they have..."