Business Commons^™

Psychological Factors And Consumer Behavior During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Adolfo Di Crosta, Irene Ceccato, Daniela Marchetti, Pasquale La Malva, Roberta Maiella, Loreta Cannito, Mario Cipi, Nicola Mammarella, Riccardo Palumbo, Maria Cristina Verrocchio, Rocco Palumbo, Alberto Di Domenico

Management, Marketing, and Organizational Communication Department Student Works

The COVID-19 pandemic is far more than a health crisis: it has unpredictably changed our whole way of life. As suggested by the analysis of economic data on sales, this dramatic scenario has also heavily impacted individuals’ spending levels. To better understand these changes, the present study focused on consumer behavior and its psychological antecedents. Previous studies found that crises differently affect people’s willingness to buy necessities products (i.e., utilitarian shopping) and non-necessities products (i.e., hedonic shopping). Therefore, in examining whether changes in spending levels were associated with changes in consumer behavior, we adopted a fine-grained approach disentangling between necessities …