Abstract:

In light of social development and technology advance, joint consumption—a kind of consumption in which multiple consumers jointly share the cost and the final product—becomes more ubiquitous in our lives and engenders new phenomena in group decision-making situations alongside gift-giving, food/drink consumption, and entertainment/activity. The frequency of making joint consumption choices is also reflected in the literature. However, extant social psychology research mainly focuses on examining the effects of typical factors in joint consumption (e.g., genders, roles), while neglecting the basic underlying characteristics of joint consumption (e.g., the key difference between joint consumption and individual consumption), or the systematic review of irrational behavior in joint consumption (e.g., risk preference, variety seeking, decision difficulty).

To address this gap in the literature, the present project based on mental account theory proposes a new construct—group mental account—to explain particular irrational behaviors in joint consumption. In other words, we illustrate the decision-making process of joint consumption as mental coding and evaluation of combinations of gains and losses by a collection of multiple people’s group mental accounts. According to mental accounting theory, joint consumption would lead to a maximizing bias. Three key mental arithmetic features of mental accounting system—(1) valuation beyond compound outcomes; (2) non-fungibility of different mental accounts; (3) malleability in the mental accounting process—could help explain the underlying mechanism. Specifically, in joint consumption conditions, each individual would construct a group mental account. Then due to the heterogeneity and aggregation problems of group members’ preferences, they encounter high ambiguity that attenuates the role of the budgetary role of mental accounts. In order to overcome uncertainty brought by group decision-making, consumers activate maximizing mindset, resulting in their salient goal to get the best, decision difficulty, and tendency to compare among alternatives.

Based on the rationale of maximizing bias, the present project examines consumers’ irrational behaviors and corresponding psychological mechanisms and boundaries under two major joint consumption contexts, including choices for others (i.e., group gift giving) and sharing consumption with others (i.e., joint purchase).

In the group gift-giving context, with the purpose of giving the best-liked gifts to satisfying recipients, gift-givers expect to match recipient preferences against their group membership status. When people select gifts for a recipient, they are more likely to activate maximizing mindset because of the budgeting effect and choose a meaningful “big” gift in group versus individual gift-giving situation. As a result, the multiple-giver case (vs. single-giver case) may prompt givers to select more expensive and impactful gifts that acknowledge their group membership identity. In addition, the purpose of gift-giving (communal vs. exchange) and the entitativity (high vs. low) of giving group will moderate the effect of group (vs. individual) consumption condition on the gift choice.

When it comes to the joint purchase context, multiple consumers jointly share the cost and the final product. The belief that “I experience” is transformed into the belief that “We experience”. Consumers will pay more attention to balancing self-other consumption preferences, thus activating maximizing mindset. They choose from a larger set of alternatives to yield a desirable consumption experience. For example, consumers would unconsciously prefer options with greater uncertainty and sensory stimulation. The present project explores the boundary conditions as well. Relationship type (family vs. friend) and relationship culture (individualism vs. collectivism) will moderate the effect of different consumption conditions (group vs. individual) on consumption preference. In conclusion, the present research contributes to a growing literature on joint consumption and mental account theory, as well as providing marketing strategies to promote healthy and sustainable consumption.

Key words: joint consumption, group mental accounting, the maximization bias, irrational behaviors