5.12 Money Minding in an Era of Declining Trust

Session Submission Type: Special Session

Session Overview

The world is a tumultuous place. The value of currency fluctuates constantly: by the day and the hour. Consumers struggle to mind their money through fiscally responsible decisions in the midst of chronic volatility and future uncertainty (Joireman et al. 2005; Sato 2011). In addition, the Edelman Trust Barometer shows there is declining trust in government and business (Harrington 2017). To cope with financial ambiguity, consumers adopt strategies including personal budgeting (Wagoner 2011), willful cognitive disengagement, rational ignorance (Caplan 2001), and boycotting traditional markets (Yosupov 2015). With varying levels of financial literacy, consumers navigate financial decision-making using a combination of prescribed and folk/lay semantics (Baroni et al. 2011), and utilizing and foregoing institutional advice, assistance, and programming.

This session ties to the ACR 2018 conference theme, “Trust in Doubt? Consuming in a Post Trust World,” addressing the issue of consumer financial decision-making in a low trust context. Two questions guide this session: 1) how do consumers orient to institutions when seeking fiscal responsibility in low trust contexts and 2) how do consumers operationalize semantics to make sound financial decisions. The first paper examines consumers’ efforts to use pre-commitment programs to inspire healthy habits. The author shows that consumers sign up for a pre-commitment program through their health insurance provider and voluntarily risk guaranteed financial resources to incentivize themselves to engage in healthier eating. This provider-designed program motivates compliance by linking financial and healthful decisions. The second paper investigates how indebted consumers utilize debt management programs to strategize repayment, avoid future debt obligations, and enhance financial literacy. In this study, consumers engage in semantic manipulation to distinguish needs from wants and legitimize the purchase of certain wants in well-planned purposeful ways. The third paper illustrates how consumers collaborate to stretch their financial resources by actively opposing established market institutions. The authors reveal how consumer collectives adopt an antagonistic stance toward corporations, creating deals by bundling promotions across manufacturers, retailers and third-party payers. The final paper examines the consumption of bitcoin, a new technology-enabled peer-to-peer currency, which allows consumers to opt out of traditional institutions. The authors show how cryptocurrency enhances financial decision-making by recording and tracking financial flows. With bitcoin, financial arrangements become transparent, as exchanges are catalogued and traced. This transactional transparency subverts established institutions, creating a new standard for financial responsibility, and new semantics to convey the standards.

Taken together, these papers show an array of ways consumers act fiscally responsible in low trust contexts: institutional reliance, institutional resistance, and institutional abandonment. The first two papers show consumers relying on traditional health insurance and financial institutions to assist their money minding while the last two papers show consumers turning their backs on institutions and creating and promoting peer-to-peer systems to enhance financial decision-making. All four papers demonstrate consumers engaging in active semantic manipulation to evaluate and implement fiscal responsibility. We expect the session to generate substantive discussion from researchers interested in consumer financial decision-making, Fintech, cryptocurrencies, and peer-to-peer collaboration.

Sub Track

• Special Sessions

Individual Presentations

• Silencing the Call of the Sirens - Janet Schwartz, Tulane University, USA

• Institutional Influence on Indebted Consumers’ Understanding of Wants and Needs - Mary Celsi, California State University Long Beach, USA; Stephanie Dellande, Menlo College; Mary Gilly, University of California Irvine, USA; Russ Nelson, Northwestern University, USA

• Beyond Needs and Wants: How Networked Hyper-rational Economic Actors “Win” the Deal but “Lose” the Shopping Trip - Colin Campbell, University of San Diego, USA; Hope Schau, University of Arizona, USA

• Trading Crypto Currency: The Ideological Shaping of Consumer Financial Decision Making - Burcak Ertimur, Fairleigh Dickinson University; Ela Veresiu, York University, Canada; Markus Giesler, York University, Canada

Session Chairs

• Russ Nelson, Northwestern University, USA

• Hope Schau, University of Arizona, USA