From Money to Memory: Do People Accurately Predict Happiness for Experiential Purchases?

Abstract

Predicting how we will feel in the future can be important to deciding on what will maximize our happiness, but research has shown that we do not always make accurate forecasts.Prior research has established that people are prone to overestimating how they might feel in the future (Wilson & Gilbert, 2003).However, there is a lack of research on how these forecasts may be influenced by money source.The current study seeks to determine if money received as a windfall has a greater impact on the accuracy of purchase happiness forecasts for experiential purchases compared to earned money.The findings did not provide evidence of the expected impact of windfall on affective forecasts, but purchase happiness overestimations did occur when comparing forecasts to experience and memory.The moderating effect of buying tendencies and individual values were also examined across the consumption timeline.Although tendencies and values did not moderate purchase happiness, an exploratory analysis did find that material consumers remembered less purchase happiness than experiential consumers.This analysis supports prior research that has shown material consumers experience less hedonic benefits compared to experiential consumers (Zhang et al., 2014).However, due to previous recall paradigms examining purchase happiness, it has been unclear where in the consumption timeline that purchase happiness levels diverge.Furthermore, this analysis reveals that the memory timepoint for experiential purchases differ between experiential and material consumers.

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