| The primary reason for studying mental accounting is to enhance our understanding the psychology of choice. With the university students as samples and situation-stimuli experiment, the article carries out an explorative study on the mental accounting mechanism based on the Chinese culturual situation, especially about non-funigibility,the important characteristic of mental accounting,. The frist research is to study the interpersonal non-fungiblity of mental accounting.There are two sub-researches in this research and they respectively explore the function of specialty and time-preference to interpersonal non-funigibility. The second research is value non-fungiblity of mental accounting which is also divided into two sub-researches. The first sub-research explores the non-fungiblity influence of righteousness-benefit trade-off (it is operationalized into"realistic benefit"and"symbolic benefit")to mental accounting. The second sub-research explores the influence of emotion and rationality to mental accounting. In brief, we get following conclusions through the four researches mentioned above:1.Mental accounting has its own prominent culture characteristic. Past researches on cognitive mechanism of mental accounting have some absolutization tendency and ignore the important influence of culture to human cognition. In this study, resarcher finds the interpersonal relationship and righteousness-benefit trade-off which are thought a lot by Chinese people are important cognitive elements .2.In this article, as one of the important characteristics of mental accounting, non-fungiblity has its own systemic, discriminant culture situation preference. Past researches repeatedly proved that the non-fungiblity is the most essential characteristic of mental accounting, but there is few concrete research on the mechanism of non-fungiblity itself. In this article, it is proved that the non-fungiblity of money in mental accounting is based on the diversity and non-fungibility of interpersonal relationship and values, not on people's prediction on money.3.The article proves that the manifestation style of non-fungibility of interpersonal relationship in mental accounting is very stable and basically is not influenced by the other important factors, such as the specialty, time collapse, ect. There are four relationships in this article: relatives, friends, acquaintances and strangers. It is proved that there is no prominent difference in the mental accounting effects between relatives, friends and strangers, while the mental accounting caused by the acquaintance is the most conservative.4.Mental accounting is a trade-off mechanism to the opportunity cost or risk and the non-fungibility is the evaluation to the value of the opportunity cost. In the first sub-research of the first research, we find that people unconsciously pay more attention to the latent opportunity cost of interpersonal relationship than its specialty, also the former has more prominent influence. This indicates that the conclusion made by past researchers that mental accounting will under evaluate the opportunity cost is not proper.5.The traditional culture value, especially the righteousness-benefit trade-off, has important influence to the expression of mental accounting. In this article, we definite the righteousness as"symbolic benefit"and definite the"benefit"as"realistic benefit". We find that we Chinese has stable different expression to our own realistic benefit, others'realistic benefit, our own symbolic benefit and others'symbolic benefit. When it comes to the realistic benefit, our expression is more conform to the framing effect and loss aversion, while to symbolic benefit, it is more risk reference. This conclusion is different to foreign researches.6.Mental accounting is a decision-making behavior based on"bounded rationality"or"ecological rationality", not on"irrationality"or"non-rationality". The rationality is shaped by the environment, and the prime of the culture value has its important effect.
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