The House-Money Effect
Win a little and suddenly you'll bet wild — because it doesn't feel like your money anymore.
Grounded in the research on the house money effect
The casino origin
The name is gambler slang. After a win, the chips in front of you feel like the casino's money, not yours, so you push them back onto the table without flinching. Thaler and Johnson borrowed the phrase to label a real bias: a prior gain makes you hungrier for risk. You'd never have walked in and bet that money. But you won it, so it's playing chips now.
1990: Thaler and Johnson
Richard Thaler and Eric Johnson formalized it in their 1990 paper 'Gambling with the House Money and Trying to Break Even,' published in Management Science. They ran real-money experiments showing people get more risk-seeking right after a win. It built on Thaler's mental accounting work, the idea you file money into separate mental buckets and treat each bucket by different rules.