The Influence of Purchase Types on Happiness: A Review

Purpose: Previous studies have shown that consumers feel more happiness when they have experiential purchases than material purchases. This experiential advantage has aroused great concern of researchers in the field of social and consumer psychology. Focusing on this issue, the paper aims to tease out the relevant academic work and to further provide with some significant implications. Research design, data and methodology: The paper has divided the review into the following parts. Firstly, the connotation of experiential purchase and material purchase has been simply defined; Secondly, based on the logical framework of pre-factor variables, intermediary variables and regulating boundary conditions, this paper has collated the causal chain of the influence of purchases types on happiness; Finally, this paper has reviewed and summarized the shortcomings of existing studies, and have pointed out specific objectives of future research. Results: From the perspective of time utility and space form, this paper has expounded the substantive differences between the two types of purchase, which lays a foundation for the explanation of the follow-up mechanism. Moreover, the paper has mainly interpreted the intermediary mechanism from two aspects, namely, individual elements of consumers and social elements of consumption situations. Conclusions: This study expands the scope of previous happiness research and strengthens the negative events adaptation research.