Perceptions of Sharing Everyday Purchases

Abstract

Human behavior research has shown that spending money on others contributes not only to a higher satisfaction from purchases but also increases personal happiness. To better understand the “social” effects of personal spending, and how satisfaction from a purchase affects sharing it with others, we developed a personal finance logging application that not only allowed users to record their daily expenditures, but to also capture both the social and hedonic aspects of these purchases. We recruited 71 participants to record their purchasing behavior with our app for one month. Using a mixed-methods analysis we (i) computationally identify how overall purchase satisfaction relates to its sharing; and (ii) elicit motivational and experiential factors that drive our participants’ sharing of everyday purchases.