Compensatory Consumption

In recent years,our economy has increased steadily and people's disposable income has continued to increase.With a third era of consumption upgrading,people in China are putting more money from material purchase for an experience.In addition to the adjustment of the consumption structure,we frequently observe that consumers do not purchase products for the function of the goods themselves in daily life.For example: professionals show compulsive online shopping when career pressure accumulates;young adults tend to be crazier about their “fans” when they are suffering from a family relationship;students prefer to wear clothing with school logos when they are excluded;one is always craving for desserts when their significant other broke their heart,etc...These consumption phenomena are difficult to explain with traditional consumer-demand theory.To this end,researchers have tried to explain these phenomena from the perspective of compensatory consumption.Compensatory consumption refers to the process by which consumers compensate themselves for the specific product or brand when their self-concept is threatened,or their psychological needs are not met.Compensatory consumption behavior sees consumption as an alternative means and tool to compensate for psychological needs deficiency,reduce or divert self-concept threats.The existing compensatory consumption research mostly focuses on social exclusion,loss of control,selfesteem threat and death threat for specific situations,or lower classes,prisoners,and college students for a single group.Meanwhile,the type of consumption also focuses on conspicuous consumption,luxury consumption,and symbolic consumer behavior.These studies focus on material products,where the experimental design mostly uses material products as stimulant.Therefore,the conclusions are based on the material purchase.With the transformation of consumption structure in China,experience purchase has become a hot topic for researchers.We also observed that more and more consumers chose experience purchase as a compensation for the lack of psychological needs.For example,employees that works 996 resign and travel;students who fail the exam went karaoke and sing like crazy;elderly people living alone attend the elderly university,etc.From the perspective of consumption,compensatory consumption is becoming more diversified and has been extended to the field of experience purchase.From the literature perspective,experience purchase is more closely related to oneself compare to material purchase.It is easier to share and more difficult to cause social comparison.Furthermore,it better meets the basic psychological needs of the individual,making the consumers happier.Experience purchases may be an alternative tool that is more suitable for consumers to compensate for the lack of demand,reduce or transfer self-concept' threats.However,to the author's best knowledge,there is no existing studies that were able to explain individual preference for experience purchase and material purchase when making compensatory consumption.Therefore,this study innovatively introduced experience purchase into the field of compensatory consumption and explored the individual's choice preferences and mechanism of experience purchase and material purchase in the context of losing psychological needs.In addition,with the development of mobile internet,social network is playing an important role in interpersonal relationship and has become an online extension of people's daily life.Therefore,this study also introduced social network sharing as a moderator variable to study.And this work will find out what the role is when sharing behavior of the strong/weak social relationship platform in the regulation of consumer purchase and physical purchase in the context of different psychological needs and its intermediary mechanism.Based on the background and challenges mentioned above,this work systematically summarized literatures related to compensatory consumption,experience purchase and material purchase,social network sharing and selfpresentation.This research also analyzed the impact of lack of psychological needs and social network sharing on consumer choice preferences.The theoretical deduction was carried out,and a double-acting path model with the lack of psychological demand affecting compensatory consumption behavior was constructed,where main assumptions were proposed for this model.In the empirical study section,the study validated the above research models and hypotheses through four sets of studies(three sets of experimental studies and one set of questionnaires).The study discovered that when the relationship between self-esteem threat and lack of belonging was threatened,the individual would be driven by conversational motivation to lean towards experience purchase while the individual with out of control would be driven by conspicuous motivation to lean towards material purchase which is easier to compare and showing off status,wealth,and identity.After the introduction of social network sharing behavior,the interaction between the intensity of social network relationship and the status of lacking psychological needs would increase the willingness for experience purchases by high conversational motivation for those with a lack of self-esteem threat and a sense of belonging.On the other hand,the interaction between the intensity of social network relationship and the status of lacking psychological needs would increase the willingness for experience purchases by high conspicuous motivation for those with loss of control.The innovations about the study are as follows:First,this work perfects the study of complementary consumption behavior when lack of psychological needs(Independent variable).This article extends the compensatory consumption behavior from a specific situation(out of control and social exclusion)to a universal situation.Based on selfdetermination theory,this study not only aims to differentiate different behaviors corresponding to compensatory consumption under three different situations: low self-esteem,lack of belonging and out of control,but also explores the internal mechanism of compensatory consumption behavior.In the meantime,this study utilizes Williams' need-threat model(2007)to explore the compensation mechanism of different psychological needs to construct the dual function of compensatory consumption behavior.It also helps explain the consumption selection differences of individuals with different psychological needs through two major motivations—conversational motivation and conspicuous motivation,which further expands the theoretical research field of compensatory consumption.Second,this work enriches the study of material purchase and experiential purchase(Dependent variable).Researches both at home and abroad have reached the same conclusion for the features of material purchase and experiential purchase that experiential purchase can bring consumers more pleasure,higher satisfaction and purchasing happiness.Through the literature review,we can find that compared to material purchase,experiential purchase is more closely linked with individuals,easier to share and can hardly cause social comparison.Therefore,experiential purchase can meet individual's basic psychological needs.Complementary consumption,however,serves as an alternative consumption behavior compensating for the threat of selfconcept or loss of psychological needs.But in the field of compensatory consumption,there is still no research focusing on experiential purchase and material purchase.Therefore,this study introduces experiential purchase and material purchase into the field of compensatory purchase in order to the selection preference of individuals for experiential purchase and material purchase under the situation of loss of psychological needs,serving as a supplement for existing document on experiential purchase and material purchase.In the end,this work introduces the adjustment function for sharing behavior on social network.Social network is playing a critical role of consumers' everyday life.Our social circle has extended from “face-to-face” offline occasions to online platform such as Weibo or Wechat's moments.Therefore,it is in line with the realistic consumption occasions of massive consumers to include sharing behavior of social network.That's why it makes sense to explore the function boundary of loss of psychological needs to consumption type.In addition,considering consumers' behavior difference and the diversity of social networks,the study pays attention to the effect of social network sites of different relationship intensity on the consumption type and its specific function mechanism,which further perfects social network sharing research in the field of compensatory consumption.