Consumer wealth

Abstract

This article focuses on understanding the meaning of consumer wealth. Research on consumer wealth uses a variety of terminology, including but not limited to economic recessions, financial constraints, financial deprivation, financial satisfaction, financial scarcity, financial well-being, income, poverty, slack, socio-economic status (SES), subjective SES, and subjective wealth. We first review and integrate multiple streams of research to provide a discussion on the conceptualization and measurement of objective wealth (i.e., consumers' actual financial resource levels) and subjective wealth (i.e., subjective assessments of consumers' financial resource levels). We then propose an organizing framework that explains the process by which consumers construct subjective wealth perceptions, identifying different routes that can be employed, as well as common cognitive and affective responses that operate across routes to shape final assessments. This framework provides greater understanding of why subjective wealth often diverges from objective wealth, why and how certain individual differences and contextual factors influence subjective wealth perceptions, and how differences across measures of consumer wealth may confer important differences that can influence downstream responses. Our framework identifies current gaps in the literature, offering new directions for future research, along with testable hypotheses related to the antecedents and consequences of subjective wealth.