type

Field Study
Survey

method

Quantitative Inquiry
Diary Study
Remote Empirical Sampling

period

2017-2018

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Human behavior research has shown that spending money on others contributes not only to a higher satisfaction from purchases but also increases personal happiness. To better understand the “social” effects of personal spending, and how satisfaction from a purchase affects sharing it with others, I adopted and extended a personal finance logging application that not only allowed users to record their daily expenditures, but to also capture both the social and hedonic aspects of these purchases. 

In collaboration with a researcher from the University of Bristol, I recruited 71 participants to record their purchasing behavior with our app for one month. Using a mixed-methods analysis I, first, computationally identified how overall purchase satisfaction relates to its sharing; and, second, I elicited motivational and experiential factors that drive our participants’ sharing of everyday purchases. 

Project in collaboration with Leonid Ivonin from University of Bristol (UK) and Marc Langheinrich from USI Lugano (Switzerland).