Personality Traits and Household Consumption Choices

Abstract

This study examines the role personality traits play in influencing consumption decisions for both individuals and households by means of a complete system of Engel curves. Estimations are performed on the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) using the following four different samples: single men, single women, childless couples and couples with children. Personality traits are found to moderately improve the general goodness of fit of the model, reducing the RMSE on average by 2.8%. This is the result of some traits strongly contributing to explaining specific consumption categories, such as Mental Openness contributing substantially to explaining expenditure in education and culture, and several non-significant personality trait-consumption category associations. Robustness analysis suggests that the effect is fairly stable across age groups within the same household type and that the effects of personality traits on consumption choices are independent of education level.