Empirical Comparative Evidence from the Consumption Behavior of College Students in China

摘要

Consumer behavior continuously derives the social function of constructing identity. There has been extensively studied on consumer behavior from the perspective of the sociology and psychology literature, but few on how to construct social identity, the impact on the consumer decision-making, and the lack of practical research on consumption and identity construction which focus on a particular group. In this paper, the young college students of self identity, family responsibility and social expectations are regarded as the research objects which live in the dual environment of "free family" and "constructed society". The consumption is regarded as part of its identity construction, that is, through the design of consumer psychological observation scale and actual investigation to make a intensive study about the harmful consumption behavior of college students who hope to construct identity relying on consumer identity. In order to grasp the influence of consumer identity on the consumption behavior of college students in different regions, Increase the stability and reliability of the model, and clarify the overall effect of consumer identity on consumer behavior, this paper introduces the bootstrap quantile regression technology, and makes a comparative analysis of the two groups of survey data between Shanghai and Anhui college students. Research findings: First, the tendency of self identity construction leads to high confusion between the students in both consumption level and the proportion of image consumption; Second, based on the sense of belonging, group consumption behavior has obvious characteristics of mean level, and the phenomenon of "herd effect", which increases human consumption in order to obtain group identity, is widespread. Third, the boundary effect of group boundary in Anhui and Shanghai samples, which shows the rise of the proportion of image consumption and social consumption respectively.