Answer · word for word
Opportunity cost ties in through a specific, documented failure called opportunity-cost neglect (Frederick et al., 2009): people do not spontaneously represent the foregone next-best alternative when deciding to acquire. The mechanism in this domain is that money is fungible and abstract, so its opportunity cost is invisible, whereas the object is concrete and salient — the trade-off is never consciously priced. The same neglect applies to space (clutter forecloses usable living area) and time (acquiring and managing possessions forecloses other uses of hours). Reminding people of the alternative ("you could keep this $X") measurably reduces purchasing, which is itself evidence the cost is normally unrepresented.
The broader family of behavioral-economics terms for self-defeating long-run choices, grouped by the mechanism that produces the error:
Time-discounting failures (the core "long run loses" engine)
- Hyperbolic discounting / present bias: immediate rewards are overweighted relative to future ones; drives undersaving, overspending, and procrastination.
- Time (dynamic) inconsistency: preferences reverse over time — planning to save, then spending — so the plan and the act diverge.
- Projection bias: assuming future preferences will match current ones (buying now on the belief you will want or use it later).
- Hot–cold empathy gap: in a craving ("hot") state, underestimating how strongly that state is driving the decision.
Ownership and loss distortions
- Loss aversion: losses register roughly twice as heavily as equivalent gains; letting go feels worse than acquiring feels good.
- Endowment effect: ownership inflates valuation (magnitude contested in replication work, existence not).
- Sunk-cost fallacy: continuing to invest money, space, or effort because of past investment — "I already paid for it."
- Status quo bias / inertia / default bias: keeping is the path of least resistance; non-decision favors accumulation.
- Disposition effect: the financial analog — holding losing assets too long, the market version of not discarding.
Acquisition and consumption drivers
- Hedonic adaptation (the hedonic treadmill): satisfaction from a purchase decays quickly, prompting further acquisition; central to why stuff fails to deliver lasting utility.
- Diminishing marginal utility: each additional unit yields less satisfaction, yet is acquired anyway.
- Diderot effect: one acquisition spawns complementary purchases to maintain coherence.
- Conspicuous consumption / Veblen goods: buying for status signaling rather than use-value.
- Lifestyle inflation (creep): spending rises to absorb rising income, defeating saving.
- Pain of paying & payment decoupling (Prelec & Loewenstein): credit, buy-now-pay-later, and subscriptions reduce the felt cost of spending, weakening the natural brake.
Framing and accounting errors that distort the cost–benefit calculus
- Mental accounting (Thaler): treating money differently by arbitrary category ("fun money," windfalls, a storage-unit budget) rather than as fungible, producing irrational allocation.
- Narrow bracketing: evaluating each purchase in isolation rather than as part of the cumulative pattern — the precise "each item seems small" trap behind both clutter and overspending.
- Anchoring: an inflated reference price ("was $200, now $80") raises perceived value.
- Salience bias: the concrete object dominates attention; the abstract foregone saving does not.
- Choice overload / decision paralysis: too many options yield no decision — connecting directly to the decision-making deficit in hoarding.
The umbrella concept is bounded rationality (Simon): finite cognitive resources mean people satisfice rather than optimize. (One related popular term, ego depletion — willpower as a depletable resource — should be treated as contested, given substantial replication failures.)
The unifying principle, which is my synthesis rather than a single named law, is that every item above shares one structure: it privileges the immediate, concrete, and salient over the deferred, abstract, and fungible — which is exactly the asymmetry by which long-run self-interest loses.
Several of these (opportunity-cost neglect, present bias, narrow bracketing, hedonic adaptation) would extend the webpage's glossary coherently if you want them folded in.