Abstract: Mental accounting is a psychological process for individuals, households or corporations to code, organize, evaluate, and keep track of economic activities. It reveals the internal cognitive coding process related to people’s economic decision-making. Kahneman, Tversky, and Thaler found that mental accounting affected the rational economic decision-making because of the non-fungibility characterization. Great progress has been made in the application of mental accounting in the past 20 years. However, the theoretical structure of mental accounting has not been fully elucidated. The purpose of this study was to reveal the theoretical structure of mental accounting in Chinese people.
We developed a Chinese Implicit Structure of Mental Accounting Questionnaire Then we test it among 1268 individuals in nine cities of different provinces in China. We did exploratory factor analyses, certificated factor analyses, and second order analyses on the data.
The results demonstrated that the mental accounting of Chinese showed a “3-4-2” implicit structure, with “3” representing three income accounts: regular income, management income, and windfall income, “4” representing four expense accounts: commodity expense, developmental expense, hedonic expense, and relationship expense, and “2” representing two saving accounts: security save account, and risk invest account.
The present study examined further the implicit structure of mental accounting. We first found that Chinese showed a “3-4-2” implicit structure of mental accounting. This mental accounting structure model could be applied to explore individual economic decision-making, consumption behavior, saving behavior, risk investment, credit card using, human resource management, and reward motivation

Key words: mental accounting, implicit structure, income account, expense account, saving account