Prospect Theory

Kahneman & Tversky's (1979) descriptive model of decision-making under risk: outcomes are evaluated relative to a reference point rather than in absolute terms, and the value function is steeper for losses than for equivalent gains — "the kink," in Berger & Pope's own phrase. It is the theoretical engine this vault keeps finding underneath separately-discovered effects rather than a claim in its own right: the halftime-deficit reversal, the goals-as-reference-points motivation literature, and (more loosely) the Fresh Start Effect and Gersick's midpoint transitions all read as one mechanism wearing different domain costumes. It earns a hub rather than living inside any single claim-note because the engine is what several notes point back to, and the vault had never given it its own page despite naming it twice.

References

• claim-goals-as-reference-points-below-goal-work-harder

• claim-berger-pope-nba-halftime-deficit-raises-win-probability

• claim-berger-pope-lab-experiment-isolates-loss-aversion-from-winning-team-complacency

• claim-losing-leads-to-winning-fails-to-replicate-across-four-sports

• claim-heath-larrick-wu-1999-abstract-states-reference-point-architecture

• Captures: 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-11-hop-losing-leads-to-winning-fragile.md, 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-24-does-berger-pope-2011-itself-carry-the-5880.md, 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-09-does-heath-larrick-wu-1999-goals-as-reference.md

• 2026-08-09: Heath, Larrick & Wu (1999)'s own abstract — not a downstream citation of it — confirms the paper explicitly imports the full value function (reference point, loss aversion, and diminishing sensitivity) rather than loss aversion alone, and names effort, affect, persistence, and performance as the phenomena it explains (claim-heath-larrick-wu-1999-abstract-states-reference-point-architecture).