EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Personality Traits and Household Consumption Choices

Lucia Mangiavacchi, Luca Piccoli and Chiara Rapallini

The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 2021, vol. 21, issue 2, 433-468

Abstract: This study examines the role personality traits play in influencing consumption decisions for both individuals and households by means of a complete system of Engel curves. Estimations are performed on the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) using the following four different samples: single men, single women, childless couples and couples with children. Personality traits are found to moderately improve the general goodness of fit of the model, reducing the RMSE on average by 2.8%. This is the result of some traits strongly contributing to explaining specific consumption categories, such as Mental Openness contributing substantially to explaining expenditure in education and culture, and several non-significant personality trait-consumption category associations. Robustness analysis suggests that the effect is fairly stable across age groups within the same household type and that the effects of personality traits on consumption choices are independent of education level.

Keywords: Big Five personality traits; consumption choices; preferences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 D91 J12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/bejeap-2020-0189 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
Working Paper: Personality Traits and Household Consumption Choices (2018) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:bejeap:v:21:y:2021:i:2:p:433-468:n:4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/bejeap/html

DOI: 10.1515/bejeap-2020-0189

Access Statistics for this article

The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy is currently edited by Hendrik Jürges and Sandra Ludwig

More articles in The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-23
Handle: RePEc:bpj:bejeap:v:21:y:2021:i:2:p:433-468:n:4