Mental Accounting in Consumer Decision Making (Accountants and Non-Accountants) Related to Discount Coupons

"Money earned through gifts without efforts will be spent more quickly than the money resulted from efforts or works (easy come, easy go)". Human behavior related to money cannot be separated from mental accounting contained inside that person. Mental accounting frequently makes the human behavior become irrational and incompatible with the existing economic theory such as expected utility theory and fungible theory. Mental accounting is the human way of thinking, assumed that in the human brain there are barriers that would separate the events related to the money into the accounts of income, spending, and saving. The way of thinking in this decision making is certainly influenced also by background knowledge and life-story obtained by humans during their lifetime. Accountant knowledge about accounting is surely different from persons who have never known or studied accounting at all (non-accountants). This study aims to observe the mental accounting of consumers, particularly the mental accounting between consumers with accounting educational background (accountants) and nonaccounting educational background (non-accountants), which affects the behavior of decision making under conditions that there are discount coupons in online shops. This was a survey quantitative research with the samples of online shop customers redeeming the discount coupons by random sampling based on Computerized Grocery-Shopping Simulation. The test results using Linear Regression Test and Different Test in SPSS 21 state that the accounting education should revolutionize and renovate the accounting mental of accountants, so it can be more helpful in rational decision making than the non-accountants