The Mental Accounting Structure Of College Students And Its Influence On Economic Behavior

Mental accounting is a set of cognitive operations used by individual, family or organizationto focus on, code and evaluate financial activities. It denies "hypothesis of rational man", it is thefurther development of the "bounded rationality model". The studies about mental accountinghelp us to improve our understanding of mental accounting and enhance scientificity ofindividual decisions. On the basis of predecessors’ studies, this study regarded college students’mental accounting as the research focus to discuss the implicit structure of it, and to explore thepractical implications of this kind of structure on college students’ economic behavior, and toseek in-depth reasons that lead to these effects.Based on early studies, we conducted two different studies, participated by college studentsin XiaSha Higher Education Mega Center.The study1researched724college students to explore the implicit mental accountingstructure of college students by exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. Theresults indicated that: Income accounts included4accounts: Labor income, non-Labor income,Borrowed income, Free given income; Expense accounts included6accounts：Basic cost ofliving, common cost of living, Spiritual life expense, Interpersonal expense, Enjoy expense,Unexpected expense; Savings accounts included2accounts: Incremental storage investment andProtected storage.The study2, which was based on the study1and combined with other factors, researched617college students by using context experimental method to explore the influence of implicitmental accounting structure on economic behavior. Study2indicated that: in experiment1, highamount, there was a significant interaction between different income account and differentspending projects. low amount, there was a main effect significantly in the different spendingprojects, In2different capital cases, individual capital allocation showed significant difference.In experiment2, there was a significant interaction between the different spending projects andexternal label.This study made the following conclusions.(1)The results demonstrated that Chinese college students are under the influence of mentalaccounts， and it has a "4-6-2" implicit structure. (2) Only under the condition of high amount, funds from different income account will havea significant impact on college students’ economic behavior, Windfall money tends to beconsumed, regular income tends to be cautious;under the condition of low amount, funds fromdifferent income account tends to be consumed in the daily life.(3) In the matter of external tags, money with corresponding labels made more expenditure;In the matter of different spending projects, college students tend to be in accordance with thelevel of spending as "Basic cost of living, non-Basic cost of living, Spiritual life expense andInterpersonal expense,".