Stephanie M. Tully

This article focuses on understanding the meaning of consumer wealth. Research on consumer wealth uses a variety of terminology, including but not limited to economic recessions, financial constraints, financial deprivation, financial satisfaction, financial scarcity, financial well-being, income, poverty, slack, socio-economic status (SES), subjective SES, and subjective wealth. We first review and integrate multiple streams of research to provide a discussion on the conceptualization and measurement of objective wealth (i.e., consumers' actual financial resource levels) and subjective wealth (i.e., subjective assessments of consumers' financial resource levels). We then propose an organizing framework that explains the process by which consumers construct subjective wealth perceptions, identifying different routes that can be employed, as well as common cognitive and affective responses that operate across routes to shape final assessments. This framework provides greater understanding of why subjective wealth often diverges from objective wealth, why and how certain individual differences and contextual factors influence subjective wealth perceptions, and how differences across measures of consumer wealth may confer important differences that can influence downstream responses. Our framework identifies current gaps in the literature, offering new directions for future research, along with testable hypotheses related to the antecedents and consequences of subjective wealth.

Payment frequency is a fundamental yet underexplored feature of consumers’ finances. As higher payment frequencies are becoming more prevalent, consumers are receiving more frequent yet smaller paychecks. An analysis of income and expenditure data of over 30,000 consumers from a financial services provider demonstrates a naturally occurring relationship between higher payment frequencies and increased spending. A series of lab studies support this finding, providing causal evidence that higher (vs. lower) payment frequencies increase spending. The effect of payment frequency on spending is driven by changes in consumers’ subjective wealth perceptions. Specifically, higher payment frequencies reduce consumers’ uncertainty in predicting whether they will have enough resources throughout a period, increasing their subjective wealth perceptions. As such, situational factors that reduce prediction uncertainty for those paid less frequently (e.g., the timing of consumers’ expenses, income levels) moderate the impact of payment frequency. The effects of payment frequency on subjective wealth and spending can occur even when objective wealth favors those with lower payment frequencies. More broadly, the current work underscores a need to understand how timing variations in consumers’ income impact their perceptions, behaviors, and general well-being.

Each year, eligible individuals forgo billions of dollars in financial assistance in the form of government benefits. To address this participation gap, we identify psychological ownership of government benefits as a factor that significantly influences individuals’ interest in applying for government benefits. Psychological ownership refers to how much an individual feels that a target is their own. We propose that the more individuals feel that government benefits are their own, the less likely they are to perceive applying for them as an aversive ask for help, and thus, the more likely they are to pursue them. Three large-scale field experiments among low-income individuals demonstrate that higher psychological ownership framing of government benefits significantly increases participants’ pursuit of benefits and outperforms other common psychological interventions. An additional experiment shows that this effect occurs because greater psychological ownership reduces people’s general aversion to asking for assistance. Relative to control messages, these psychological ownership interventions increased interest in claiming government benefits by 20% to 128%. These results suggest that psychological ownership framing is an effective tool in the portfolio of potential behavioral science interventions and a simple way to stimulate interest in claiming benefits.

The current research introduces the concept of psychological ownership of borrowed money, a construct that represents how much consumers feel that borrowed money is their own. The authors observe both individual-level and contextual-level variation in the degree to which consumers feel psychological ownership of borrowed money, and variation on this dimension predicts willingness to borrow money for discretionary purchases. At an individual level, psychological ownership of borrowed money is distinct from other individual factors such as debt aversion, financial literacy, income, intertemporal discounting, materialism, propensity to plan, self-control, spare money, and tightwad–spendthrift tendencies, and it predicts willingness to borrow above and beyond these factors. At a contextual level, the authors document systematic differences in psychological ownership between different debt types. They show that these differences in psychological ownership manifest in consumers’ online search behavior and explain consumers’ differential interest in borrowing across debt types. Finally, the authors demonstrate that psychological ownership of borrowed money is malleable, such that framing debt using language lower in psychological ownership can reduce consumers’ propensity to borrow.

The current work examines consumers’ willingness to borrow for discretionary purchases. Previous work suggests that consumers prefer borrowing for longer-lasting purchases so that they continue to receive benefits from the purchases as they pay for them (payment-benefit duration matching). In contrast, two sets of archival data and six studies show that consumers are generally more willing to borrow for experiential purchases, in part because consumption is fleeting. Thus, simply framing physically long-lasting purchases as experiential increases willingness to borrow. We argue that these effects occur due to the differential impact of changes to planned timing for these purchases. Experiential purchases are made for consumption while material purchases are made for ownership. Compared to ownership, an ongoing stable state, changes to planned consumption seem more consequential, increasing the importance of purchase timing and, in turn, willingness to borrow. Further, we isolate our explanation for the increased willingness to borrow for experiential purchases from other explanations including the general desirability of doing versus having. Moreover, we reconcile the apparent contradiction between the predictions in the previous and current research by identifying important differences in borrowing contexts and examining the relative impact of purchase-timing importance and payment-benefit duration matching across different borrowing contexts.