Research on Relationship Between Mental Accounting and Consumer Purchase Behavior

The number of purchase points in ID-POS data approximates the number of decisions made by consumers at the time of purchase, which is an important indicator for elucidating consumer behavior. According to Belk (1975) [1], there are several factors that influence the purchase behavior of consumers, such as “physical environment,” “social environment,” “time,” “task,” and “antecedent state. Among these, changes in purchasing behavior due to issues, antecedent state, and time can be considered as a type of framing effect in psychology. Mental Accounting, which is based on the framing effect, is a theory proposed by Thaler (1985) [2] that shows that purchasing behavior changes depending on the psychological situation at the time of purchase. Miyatsu and Sato (2015) [3] conducted a quantitative study of Mental Accounting. Here, they constructed a model in which consumers’ Mental Accounting is switched based on the threshold of each consumer's psychological pressure, and clarified the mechanism by which the number of purchase points is generated. However, consumers’ psychological load does not change before and after the threshold, but is considered to be a change in three states: a state of reduced psychological load, a state of no psychological load, and a state of weighted psychological load. In this study, the two-state switching model based on mental load and threshold is extended to a three-state switching model based on mental pressure and two thresholds to clarify a more realistic mechanism of occurrence.