Acta Universitatis Danubius. Œconomica, Vol 8, No 5 (2012)

Abstract

The psychological motivations of consumers’ purchases have started to gain more and more attention from various researchers from psychology to sociology and economy. Yet there are many steps needed for the progress of the understanding this less rational part of the consumers’ choices. This paper aims to identify in the literature a theoretical model that could be further used in identifying and measuring the affective and symbolic motivations for the Romanian consumers. For this purpose we studied literature from social psychology that is of interest for economic and business studies, and we have identified the model of Dittmar (2008) as a suitable framework for our purpose. We further found some empirical applications of this model that encourage its application in empirical testing, and also provide interesting insights on consumers.