On the Mental Accounting of Restricted-Use Funds: How Gift Cards Change What People Purchase
研究发现，使用特定零售商礼品卡购物时，人们更倾向于购买该零售商典型商品，而非通用货币购物者，这源于心理账户的分类效应。
This article emphasizes the role of categorization in mental accounting and proposes that once a mental account is established, purchases that are highly congruent with the purpose of the mental account (i.e., typical category members) will be more preferred in selection decisions compared to purchases that are less congruent (i.e., atypical category members). This hypothesis is tested in the context of gift cards. Six studies find that people shopping with a retailer-specific gift card-and so, the authors argue, possessing a retailer-specific mental accountexpress an increased preference for products more typical of the retailer compared to those shopping with more fungible currency. This pattern is found to occur for both well-known retailers, where people already possess product-typicality knowledge, and fictional retailers, where product-typicality cues are provided. An alternative account based on semantic priming is not supported by these data. These results both broaden the contemporary understanding of how mental accounting influences preferences and provide retailers deeper insight into their customers' decision processes.