Development of mental accounting in young children´s economic decision making

A child version of mental accounting tasks has been administrated on 180 3- to 5-year-olds to tentatively investigate the development of young children´s mental accounting. The results show that the development of young children´s mental accounting varies along with age in the three ways in which the non-fungibility effect of mental accounting takes effect. In the expenditure loss task (ELT), mental accounting develops very slowly, from .03 at age 3 to .08 at age 5; in the income source task (IST), it develops still slowly, from .10 at age 3 to .27 at age 5; in the saving intention task (SIT), it develops much better than that in the above two tasks, from .33 at age 3 to .57 at age 5. There is no difference according to sex in the effect of mental accounting in young children´s economic decision-making.