Financial Constraints and Purchase Happiness

Financial constraints change attention, choice, and consumption in important ways. This work examines how financial constraints affect one important outcome at a later stage of the consumer decision-making process: purchase happiness. Eight high-powered studies (N = 7,481) demonstrate that financial constraints decrease the happiness consumers derive from their purchases. This, in turn, leads to a consequential outcome: less favorable consumer reviews. This effect occurs because consumers who feel more (vs. less) financially constrained are more likely to consider opportunity costs when evaluating their purchases. Furthermore, this effect is independent of consumers’ objective constraints (e.g. income) and social class, is not due to a general decrease in life satisfaction or mood, and is robust across several purchase types. Consistent with our proposed mechanism, the effect attenuates when opportunity costs are made salient and when consumers consider purchases for which opportunity costs are naturally less salient (i.e., planned purchases). Moreover, although financial constraints decrease actual purchase happiness, they increase expected purchase happiness, suggesting that financial constraints can have differential effects across decision-making stages. Finally, we meta-analyze our file drawer (17,750 participants; 33 studies) to examine how the effect differs across purchase types and discuss theoretical and practical contributions for consumers and marketers.