Possessions and the Self: Downstream Consequences of Ownership and Sharing What We Own

Possessions and the Self: Downstream Consequences of Ownership and Sharing What We Own

Possessions and the Self: Downstream Consequences of Ownership and Sharing What We Own Jaeyeon Chung Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2018 © 2018 Jaeyeon Chung All rights reserved ABSTRACT Possessions and the Self: Downstream Consequences of Ownership and Sharing What We Own Jaeyeon Chung My dissertation is based on the premise that possessions are an extension of the self. Beyond simple functional benefits that possessions provide us, I question whether possessions affect our self-perception and behavior. Specifically, I focus on two aspects of possessions: Ownership (Essay 1) and Sharing (Essay 2). In Essay 1, I find that feeling a sense of product ownership has downstream consequences in one’s representation of who s/he is. Here I reveal that salient feelings of product ownership activate a product-related self in one’s mind, but more importantly deactivate product-unrelated self. By identifying simultaneous identity activation and deactivation, I show that an individual can only hold a limited number of salient selves, and activating one’s self aspect requires a trade-off. This finding updates the prior assumption in the literature that an individual can hold an unlimited number of selves, and further suggests that there is still a finite limit to what can be salient at a given time. My interest in ownership extends to Essay 2, where I examine another behavioral aspect of consumers: sharing. Sharing behavior has received much attention lately due to the rise of sharing economy platforms, which provide new opportunities for consumers to share personal belongings with others. In Essay 2, I mine people’s latent motivation behind sharing by using a transaction dataset from one of the largest sharing economy platforms, Airbnb. Here I find that people are driven by not only monetary, but also non-monetary reasons, such as desires to meet others and share the beauty of their homes. Then I explore how each motivation affects people’s engagement on the sharing economy platform and their continued effort to share. This second essay highlights individuals’ new role as micro-entrepreneurs in this new era of the 21st century. TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES ......................................................................................................................... iii LIST OF FIGURES ....................................................................................................................... iv CHAPTER 1 ................................................................................................................................... 1 INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 2 ................................................................................................................................... 4 LITERATURE REVIEW ............................................................................................................... 4 2.1. Multi-facets of the Self ........................................................................................................ 4 2.2 The Relationship between Self-concept and Product Consumption ..................................... 7 2.3. Legal and Psychological Ownership .................................................................................... 9 2.4. Owning Possessions: Downstream Consequences ............................................................ 11 2.5. Sharing Possessions: Behavioral Consequences ................................................................ 12 CHAPTER 3 ................................................................................................................................. 14 ESSAY 1: THE SEESAW SELF: POSSESSIONS, IDENTITY (DE)ACTIVATION AND TASK PERFORMANCE ............................................................................................................. 14 3.2. Experiment 1 ...................................................................................................................... 22 3.3. Experiment 2 ...................................................................................................................... 30 Psychological Ownership of a Calculator and Performance on Math vs. Creative Writing Labeled Tasks ........................................................................................................................... 30 3.4. Experiment 3 ...................................................................................................................... 33 3.5. Experiment 4 ...................................................................................................................... 36 3.6. Experiment 5 ...................................................................................................................... 39 3.7. General Discussion ............................................................................................................ 42 CHAPTER 4 ................................................................................................................................. 48 ESSAY 2: THE SHARING ECONOMY ..................................................................................... 48 4.1. Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 49 4.2. Extracting Motivations from Textual Responses ............................................................... 59 4.3. Downstream Consequences of Host Motivations .............................................................. 68 4.4. The Pricing Decision by Motivations ................................................................................ 77 4.5. Essay 2 General Discussion ............................................................................................... 83 CHAPTER 5 ................................................................................................................................. 92 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................. 92 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................. 95 APPENDICES ............................................................................................................................ 114 Appendix 1 .............................................................................................................................. 114 Appendix 2 .............................................................................................................................. 115 Appendix 3 .............................................................................................................................. 116 Appendix 4 .............................................................................................................................. 120 Appendix 5 .............................................................................................................................. 121 Appendix 6 .............................................................................................................................. 125 Appendix 7 .............................................................................................................................. 126 Appendix 8 .............................................................................................................................. 129 Appendix 9 .............................................................................................................................. 130 Appendix 10 ............................................................................................................................ 131 Appendix 11 ............................................................................................................................ 133 Appendix 12 ............................................................................................................................ 134 Appendix 12 ............................................................................................................................ 135 Appendix 14 ............................................................................................................................ 136 Appendix 15 ............................................................................................................................ 140 Appendix 16 ............................................................................................................................ 145 Appendix 17 ............................................................................................................................ 147 Appendix 18 ............................................................................................................................ 148 Appendix 19 ............................................................................................................................ 150 Appendix 20 ............................................................................................................................ 151 ii LIST OF TABLES Table # Table Name Page 1 Descriptive Statistics of Airbnb Dataset P57 2 Definitions of Different Motivations P61 3 The Performance

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