Development of mental accounting in young children´s economic decision making

Author

Yonggang, Wei ; Xiaoling, Su

Author_Institution

Key Lab. of Appl. Psychol., Chongqing Normal Univ., Chongqing, China

fYear

2011

fDate

8-10 Aug. 2011

Firstpage

5508

Lastpage

5511

Abstract

A child version of mental accounting tasks has been administrated on 180 3- to 5-year-olds to tentatively investigate the development of young children´s mental accounting. The results show that the development of young children´s mental accounting varies along with age in the three ways in which the non-fungibility effect of mental accounting takes effect. In the expenditure loss task (ELT), mental accounting develops very slowly, from .03 at age 3 to .08 at age 5; in the income source task (IST), it develops still slowly, from .10 at age 3 to .27 at age 5; in the saving intention task (SIT), it develops much better than that in the above two tasks, from .33 at age 3 to .57 at age 5. There is no difference according to sex in the effect of mental accounting in young children´s economic decision-making.

Keywords

accounting; decision making; psychology; IST; SIT; economic decision making; income source task; mental accounting tasks; saving intention task; Decision making; Economics; Educational institutions; Europe; Interviews; Psychology; Writing; children; economic decision-making; mental accounting;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Artificial Intelligence, Management Science and Electronic Commerce (AIMSEC), 2011 2nd International Conference on

Conference_Location

Deng Leng

Print_ISBN

978-1-4577-0535-9

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/AIMSEC.2011.6009842

Filename

6009842