Materialism as the Mediator of the Association between Subjective Well-being and Impulsive Buying Tendency

The findings of the research are consistent and demonstrate the negative relationship between materialism and subjective well-being. The literature also suggests that materialism is one of the main predictors of impulsive buying. It should also be noted that though the relationship of materialism and subjective well-being has been extensively explored, the ambiguity with respect to the directionality of the relationship still prevails in the literature. Subjective well-being recently became the subject of interest of scientists from different fields. However, the relationship of well-being with consumer buying behaviour received scarce attention. In particular the effect of life satisfaction (well-being) on consumers' tendency toward impulsive buying behaviour, except for a few attempts, has been nearly left unaddressed. This study attempts to explain the underlying mechanism of the relationship of subjective well-being and inclination toward impulsive buying behaviour. We hypothesise that subjective well-being affects the propensity toward impulsive buying indirectly through the presence of materialism. Lower levels of well-being increase materialism that in turn leads to a higher-level impulsive buying tendency. The results of the applied path analysis (regression based mediation) support the assumption of the indirect well-being-impulsive buying tendency link, mediated by the level of materialism