“Feeling Economics”

When we buy goods from daily necessaries to a food like a fast food and eat out, how do we decide what we buy, or what we eat? Price, quality, and quantity and so on. Then, what about “feelings”?

When I was wondering which food I would buy during my going back home, of course I take price, quality and quantity into account, but I felt like eating MacDonald too much, and I wanted to eat much, so I ate one of the their supreme hamburgers, BigMac. It cost me 300yen and I known it would burden me, but I decided to eat it. Why? It is only because I felt like eating MacDonald too much, and I wanted to eat much. People believe that they are rational and practical under normal circumstance, and I want believe I am rational and practical. However, it seems completely wrong. At that time, I mainly depend on feelings and a part of instinct to decide which things to buy, not on reason and I did not consider price and amount of money I have. Do you have any experiences similar to this?

Then, it occurs to me that we mainly depend on feelings to decide to buy goods or eat something especially influenced by intuition and taste. In fact, price, quality and quantity would be changeable in our mind owing to our feeling at the time, besides it is likely for these elements to be made up of our feelings. And we rely on it, we seem not to consider price at all. Certainly our reason can control our feelings and instinct when we face serious problems like a career and school. However, in everyday life, making decisions about trivial things especially for food, although it is because what we want to eat is closely related and influenced by feelings at that time, our reason seemed to be almost defeated by our feelings or intuitions. We depend on our feelings and are controlled. So, I would like to call these mechanisms “Feeling Economics”. I know I need to do more research in this and take more cases, but now I want to write this down.

What do you think? Do you have any arguments? And do you have your original and special economics?

By Takenaka