The article explores how people's fear of losing money affects their bidding behavior in auctions. By combining risk aversion and loss aversion, the researchers found that bidders tend to bid higher than expected. They discovered that loss aversion explains a significant portion of this overbidding, with risk aversion also playing a role. The study used a model to estimate these factors and found that loss aversion explains around 65 to 86 percent of the overbidding observed in the data.