Consumers’ Mental Representation of Expenditures
Implications for Spending and Savings Decisions
Dados Bibliográficos
| ID | 11074774 |
|---|---|
| Autores | Lin Fei (0000-0002-8187-6295, Uber AI (United States), autor correspondente), Daniel M Bartels (0000-0003-1642-8426, University of Chicago), W Zhang (0000-0002-9165-3212, University of Pennsylvania), Wei-Hua Zhang (0000-0003-1785-7281, University of Pennsylvania), Walter W Zhang |
| Editores | Stacy Wood (0000-0001-5256-1772), Stephen A Spiller (0000-0001-6951-6046) |
| Ano | 2025 |
| Volume | 52 |
| Fascículo | 6 |
| Páginas | 1076-1101 |
| Data de publicação | 2025-05-21 |
| Peer Reviewed | Sim |
| Open Access | Sim |
| Tipo | ARTICLE |
| Periódico | Journal of Consumer Research (JOURNAL) |
| Identificadores do periódico | ISSN: 0093-5301 • E-ISSN: 1537-5277 |
| Editora | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jcr/ucaf031 |
| OpenAlex | W4410558695 |
| Idioma | EN |
| Referências citadas | 67 |
People’s mental representation of expenditures is crucial to their budgeting. This article proposes that much like how they represent natural kinds (e.g., animals and plants), people represent expenditures in a hierarchical taxonomy. Seven studies, supported by six norming studies and three pilots, revealed that expenditures are represented hierarchically. We first recover people’s mental representations using a successive pile-sort method that asks people to form hierarchies of categories with common expenditures (e.g., rent, dining out, etc.). The pile-sort reveals consensus in people’s representations of expenditures and that these representations are relatively stable over time. Further, people’s adjustment in their spending behavior can be predicted by the distance between items in their representation. Specifically, when people overspent on an item, they spontaneously adjust spending more on taxonomically closer items. We examine this spontaneous adjustment behavior using both laboratory studies and field data with 6.5 million grocery shopping trips over 12 years. The findings highlight the connection between mental representation and consumer behavior, and they emphasize the importance of studying concepts and categories in the context of consumption
Economics · Mental accounting · Microeconomics · Political science · Politics · Public economics · Representation (politics) · Financial Literacy, Pension, Retirement Analysis · Leadership, Behavior, and Decision-Making Studies · Psychology
Multidimensional Scaling
Categorization and Reasoning among Tree Experts
Ideals, central tendency, and frequency of instantiation as determinants of graded structure in categories.
Category-based induction.
The Psychology of Windfall Gains
Consumer Evaluations of Brand Extensions
Gambling with the House Money and Trying to Break Even
Respects for similarity.
Hedonic Consumption
Basic objects in natural categories
Ad hoc categories
Retrieval time from semantic memory
Regression Models for Ordinal Data
Family resemblances
What comes to mind
Locating what comes to mind in empirically derived representational spaces
The Native Mind
A symbolic-connectionist theory of relational inference and generalization
Ethnobiological Classification
Structure mapping in analogy and similarity
Preference and the specificity of goals
Choices, values, and frames
Mental accounting matters
Mental budgeting and the management of household finance
The Successive Pile Sort
Recall and Consumer Consideration Sets
Mental Budgeting and Consumer Decisions
How Tall Is a Taxonomic Tree? Some Evidence for Dwarfism1
Culture as Consensus
Cultural Consensus Theory
Preference Reversals in Willingness to Pay and Choice
On the Mental Accounting of Restricted-Use Funds
The Exception Is the Rule
A Generalizable Scale of Propensity to Plan
Resisting That Triple-Chocolate Cake
Unfixed Resources
| Velocidade de citação | historical |
|---|---|
| Altamente citado | Não |