The person who mows his own lawn doesn't have to worry about finding a trustworthy groundskeeper. A person who doesn't try to mow other people's lawns doesn't have to worry about finding a trustworthy customer. Thus, there is a clear incentive for a person to mow his own lawn but no one else's.
A colleague confessed that he'd never go out and buy a $50 bottle of wine for a family meal, but that he'd recently opened up a $50 bottle at dinner because it happened to be lying around.
Could he have instead converted the latter bottle into $50 cash? If not, it wasn't really a $50 bottle of wine any more.
While it's true that people often behave in ways that are not rational (especially in matters related to the probabilities of unexpected losses versus unexpected gains) I fail to see the above examples as signs of anything other than the author's ignoring certain economic factors.
I agree. Also, in the example of lawn-mowing, perhaps the homeowner simply enjoys caring for his own property, and would do far more than $10 worth of work in the process of mowing. And, in addition, this person might find the prospect of mowing another’s lawn for a mere $10 to be an insult.
In the case of the wine, what one can buy from a wine merchant for $50 would far surpass in quality what one might buy in a restaurant for $50. Th two cases are not contradictory behavior if the wine drinker perceives the $50 bottle at home to be a better value.