Desire to acquire: Powerlessness and compensatory consumption

Abstract

Three experiments examine how power affects consumers ’ spending propensities. By integrating literatures suggesting that (a) powerlessness is aversive, (b) status is one basis of power, and (c) products can signal status, the authors argue that low power fosters a desire to acquire products associated with status to compen-sate for lacking power. Supporting this compensatory hypothesis, results show that low power increased consumers ’ willingness to pay for auction items and consum-ers ’ reservation prices in negotiations but only when products were status related. The link between powerlessness and compensatory consumption has broad im-plications both for consumers ’ health and well-being and for understanding the psychological state of power. Power is perhaps one of the most omnipresent forces inconsumers ’ social world. Throughout the day individ-uals are likely to have experiences of feeling both powerful and powerless. For example, meeting with one’s boss, de-fending a thesis, or submitting a job application might evoke the psychological state of feeling powerless. Conversely, interviewing a potential employee, giving advice, or setting a curfew for one’s child might evoke the opposite state of feeling powerful. Similarly, in contemporary capitalism, consumption takes front and center on the stage of everyday life. Despite the importance of the twin forces of power and powerlessness, the relationship between them has not been systemically explored. The current research addresses a straightforward but important question: is a state of low power associated with a decreased willingness to pay for products, or might powerlessness actually produce an in-creased desire to acquire certain types of products? One simple prediction is that a state of low power might *Derek D. Rucker is assistant professor of marketing, Northwestern Uni