Mental accounting

Common card · No. 481064

Mental accounting (or psychological accounting) is a model of consumer behaviour developed by Richard Thaler that attempts to describe the process whereby people code, categorize and evaluate economic outcomes. Mental accounting incorporates the economic concepts of prospect theory and transactional utility theory to evaluate how people create distinctions between their financial resources in the form of mental accounts, which in turn impacts the buyer decision process and reaction to economic outcomes. People are presumed to make mental accounts as a self control strategy to manage and keep track of their spending and resources. People budget money into mental accounts for savings (e.g., saving for a home) or expense categories (e.g., gas money, clothing, utilities). People also are assumed to make mental accounts to facilitate savings for larger purposes (e.g., a home or college tuition). Mental accounting can result in people demonstrating greater loss aversion for certain mental accounts...

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