Economic and Psychological Determinants of Consumer Behavior

Abstract

Consumer behavior was “rst and predominantly studied byeconomists who relied heavily on rational decision makingand consistent utility maximization. However, the strongpostulates of rationality were questioned early on by psy-chologists, sociologists, and anthropologists who started toinvestigate the “eld from the perspective of actual humanbehavior and saw decision making as determined by emo-tions and limitations of human information processing.Behavioral economists and economic psychologists con-vincingly argue that economic decisions in general and con-sumer decisions in particular rarely follow the normativerational choice model. Decisions are affected by feelingsand sentiments, motives, attitudes, the subjective construc-tion of meaning, biases, and heuristics in information pro-cessing, social symbols, and social in”uence from familyand peer groups (e.g., Ga ¨rling, Kirchler, Lewis, & VanRaaij, 2010; Traut-Mattausch, Frey, & Peus, 2008).Consumer behavior is receiving much attention in eco-nomic psychology. It is one of the most prominent “eldsof research, development, and application of economic deci-sion theories (Kirchler & Hoelzl, 2006). While increasinglymore economistsare becoming awareofthe relevance ofthepsychological perspective in advancing understanding ofeconomic phenomena, psychologists often perceive researchonconsumer behavior andeconomic decisionsas an applied“eld such as health and clinical psychology, educationalpsychology, work and organizational psychology, traf“candenvironmental psychology,orcriminal andforensicpsy-chology. We received numerous responses to our call forpapers forthepresentspecial issue, andfromthese we chosescholars in the “elds of consumer behavior and economicdecisions research to report their “ndings. The goal was todemonstrate to the readers of the Zeitschrift fu ¨r Psychologie/ Journal of Psychology how relevant psychological think-ing is in understanding consumer behavior, and how fruitfulit can be to learn from economic theorizing to advance psy-chological research.Most of the topics in consumer behavior involve eco-nomic decisions. These are decisions about the use of scarceresources, such as money, time, or effort (van Raaij, 1981).While economic decisions encompass various types ofresources, decisions concerning money are termed “nancialdecisions. Financial decisions have signi“cant effects on theeconomy, given that private households have a major part ofa nations “nancial resources at their disposal (Burgoyne K Anand & Lea,2011) provide an overview of the current research ineconomic decision making.Studies on buying decisions refer to impulse purchases,habitual purchases, and genuine purchasing decisionsmade either individually or jointly with household members.The decision type spontaneous, habitual, autonomous, orjoint is in”uenced by characteristics of the products, theirsymbolic meaning, social visibility, the amount of moneyinvolved, the availability of cognitive scripts, and whetherother persons in the household are affected by the purchaseditems (Kirchler et al., 2001).This special issue contains seven empirical papers onconsumer behavior and economic decisions. All contribu-tions demonstrate the wide range of perspectives and theo-retical frameworks that can be brought to this applied “eldof research, and they provide future directions for theorydevelopment and practical applications, such as marketing,consumercounseling,orpolicy.Selectedtopicsaretheaccu-racy of consumer perception of prices and price increases,