THE PUZZLE OF SIMULTANEOUS SAVINGS AND DEBTS
Journal Title: Challenges of the Knowledge Society - Year 2012, Vol 2, Issue 0
Abstract
„Neither a borrower nor a lender be” recommends Shakespeare in Hamlet. The advice seems particularly interesting in nowadays society where a person can be easily found in both approximate situations, in the same time. It goes without saying that saving and borrowing do not describe mutually exclusive strategies of financial management and thus many people retain savings or carry on saving at the same time as having debts. We add to this fact a more pragmatically wisdom, the one of the economist Robert Solow -“We (economists) think of wealth as fungible; we think a dollar is a dollar. Why don't they (the others) do so?” (Solow, 1987) – and we naturally ask ourselves if the mechanism of having simultaneous savings and debts is a rational one, according to traditional economics.Making appeal to the emerging body of behavioral economics literature we reach to the mental accounting theory to see if it can explain savings inclination versus debt inclination. The main research question we want to explore is the following: if mental accounting prevents people from spending money from one „mental account” on goods belonging to another one, will people – after using all their money from a given account – be willing to go into debt to buy goods belonging to this account in a situation when they still have money in other accounts?
Authors and Affiliations
RODICA IANOLE
Keywords
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