Consumer Financial Decision Making: Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going

Abstract

W henmaking purchasing decisions, consumers consider their available budget and determine what payment method they will use as well as how they will finance the purchase. Consumers must also plan for long-term consumption by considering shortand longterm savings objectives, taking into account how they will invest money saved, as well as how they will borrow needed money and repay outstanding loans. This issue of the Journal of Association of Consumer Research explores financial decision making, which we define as the accumulation and use of resources across time, as reflected by consumers’ behavior and choices. Financial decisions are foundational to consumption and thus to understanding consumer behavior. Nonetheless, while a subset of marketing academics have examined financial decision making for some time, the topic has only recently became a core area within marketing. Specifically, a 2011 special issue of the Journal of Marketing Research, edited by Professor John G. Lynch Jr., served as a call to action on the topic and launched financial decision making to the mainstream of consumer behavior research. Just over a decade later, the current issue serves as a reflection point to consider financial decision making in the academic field of marketing. In this introduction, we review progress made in themarketing field in studying financial decision making, and identify gaps and opportunities for further exploration. We first present an overview of the core topics that have been studied within financial decisionmaking research by text mining the past 2 decades of research in top marketing journals. We then propose a framework for understanding the landscape