The current research introduces the concept of psychological ownership of borrowed money, a construct that represents how much consumers feel that borrowed money is their own. We observe both individual-level and contextual-level variation in the degree to which consumers feel psychological ownership of borrowed money, and variation on this dimension predicts willingness to borrow money for discretionary purchases. At an individual level, psychological ownership of borrowed money is distinct from other individual factors such as debt aversion, financial literacy, income, intertemporal discounting, materialism, propensity to plan, self-control, spare money, and tightwad-spendthrift tendencies, and it predicts willingness to borrow above and beyond these factors. At a contextual level, we document systematic differences in psychological ownership between different debt types. We show that these differences in psychological ownership manifest in consumers’ online search behavior and explain consumers’ differential interest in borrowing across debt types. Finally, we demonstrate that psychological ownership of borrowed money is malleable, such that framing debt in terms of lower psychological ownership can reduce consumers’ propensity to borrow.

当前的研究引入了借入资金的心理所有权的概念，该结构代表多少消费者认为借钱是他们自己的。我们观察到个人对借款人心理上拥有借贷的所有权程度的个体和上下文水平的变化，并且在这个维度上的变化预示了可以随意购买商品的借贷意愿。在个人层面上，借入资金的心理所有权与其他个人因素不同，例如债务规避，金融知识，收入，跨期贴现，唯物主义，计划倾向，自我控制，零用钱和花钱节俭的倾向，预测是否愿意在这些因​​素之外进行借贷。从上下文的角度，我们记录了不同债务类型之间心理所有权的系统差异。我们表明，心理所有权上的这些差异体现在消费者的在线搜索行为中，并解释了消费者对不同债务类型的借贷的不同兴趣。最后，我们证明了借入资金的心理所有权是可延展的，因此以较低的心理所有权构筑债务可以降低消费者的借贷倾向。