Possessions and the Self

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.