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People are presumed to make mental accounts as a self control strategy to manage and keep track of their spending and resources.[4] People budget money into mental accounts for savings (e.g., saving for a home) or expense categories (e.g., gas money, clothing, utilities).[5]
Mental accounting can result in people demonstrating greater loss aversion for certain mental accounts, resulting in cognitive bias that incentivizes systematic departures from consumer rationality.
People can even have multiple mental accounts for the same kind of resource. A person may use different monthly budgets for grocery shopping and eating out at restaurants, for example, and constrain one kind of purchase when its budget has run out while not constraining the other kind of purchase, even though both expenditures draw on the same fungible resource (income).
When considering an expense, consumers appear to compare the cost of the expense to the size of an account that it would deplete (e.g., numerator vs. denominator).[17] A $30 t-shirt, for example, would be a subjectively larger expense when drawn from $50 in one’s wallet than $500 in one’s checking account. The larger the fraction, the more pain of paying the purchase appears to generate and the less likely consumers are to then exchange money for the good.
Another example of mental accounting is the greater willingness to pay for goods when using credit cards than cash.