Consumer Expending Behavior Between Hedonic And Utilitarian Consumption

Consumer buying behavior has traditionally been portrayed as rational and goal oriented. This goal seeking, task related framework, characterized by the sequence of cognitive-affective-behavioral states has been the predominant paradigm for many years. However, in more recent years the literature has focused upon the role of emotions and pleasure in consumer behavior, and typically discusses shopping orientation in terms of rational versus recreational orientation, and utilitarian versus hedonic orientation.Empirical evidence has shown that the two aspects of goal-seeking and pleasure-oriented behavior are different. People have preferences for expending different combinations of time and money for acquiring hedonic versus utilitarian items. They are willing to pay more in time for hedonic goods and pay more in money for utilitarian goods.Based on this point, this article is trying to study people' s preferences for paying in time for hedonic goods and paying in money for utilitarian goods. And based on prospect theory and loss aversion, implying that the impact of a difference on a dimension is generally greater when that difference is evaluated as a loss than when the same difference is evaluated as a gain, and losses loom larger than corresponding gains, this article study people' s change of paying in time for different hedonic goods and paying in money for different utilitarian goods.In this study, we used questionnaire experiment and One-way ANOVA analysis to prove the hypothesis, and demonstrated that, people are willing to pay more in time for increased hedonic goods, and the time paid for avoidance of hedonic loss is more than the time paid for hedonic gain. In the same way, people are willing to pay more in money for increased utilitarian goods, and the money paid for avoidance of utilitarian loss is more than the money paid for utilitarian gain.