'As happy as money can buy: exploring antecedents of happiness according to purchase type'

• Autor(a) principal: Araujo, Cecilia Maria Lobo de
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional do FGV (FGV Repositório Digital)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10438/20653
• topic: Happiness; Purchase type; Financial constraint; Psychological needs; Materialism; Felicidade com compras; Tipos de compras; Restrições financeiras; Necessidades psicológicas; Materialismo; Administração de empresas; Comportamento do consumidor; Consumo (Economia); Sociedade de consumo; Hedonismo

When a person is feeling financially constrained, as higher is the perception level of the financial constraint, as high is the happiness level associate to the purchase of a material product instead of a life experience or experiential product; this is one of the findings of this study. The objective of this work is to extend knowledge regarding happiness derived from purchases through analysis of the jointly influence of antecedents that impact positively (psychological needs) and negatively (financial constraint and materialism) the “experience recommendation” (higher level of happiness derived from experiences rather than material purchases). Those antecedents are simultaneously analyzed through structural equation modeling (SEM) and linear regression in order to understand the absolute and relative, direct and the indirect impact of each antecedent on happiness derived from each one of the three-purchase type – material, experiential, and life. In conducting this research, 654 online participants recruited via the VIDI platform answered a Google form with 57 questions related to previous effective purchases. The results show that psychological needs fulfillment is the strongest antecedent of happiness for all types of purchase. Materialism did not present a strong direct relation with happiness; however, it did have an indirect influence through psychological needs satisfaction that is achieved homogeneously across the three types of purchase. As already mentioned, Financial constraints context not only change the preference for material goods (Zhang, Howell, Caprariello, & Guevarra, 2014), but financially constrained people become significantly happier with material purchases compared to experiential and life experiences that can even make them unhappy. The results expand the work by Guevarra & Howell (2015) In joint to the analysis of the impact of psychological need satisfaction on happiness derived from purchase; the simultaneous impact of materialism, financial constraint and control variables satisfaction with life and age considering the three types of purchase; the results indicate that the reversion of “experience recommendation“, when in the presence of the cited constructs, happens when there is a low level of psychological needs satisfaction and is influenced by the other antecedents, but not with just the single impact of one of them.