How commuting time influences hedonic consumption: The role of perceived stress

The commuting cost has increased inevitably under the background of industrialization and urbanization, which has vital impacts on daily life. In this paper, we implement an empirical study to explore the impact of commuting time on hedonic consumption and the underline mechanism of perceived stress based on the data of CFPS 2014 (a national social tracking survey project). The Tobit regression combined with the Heckman two-stage model is applied to correct the sample selection bias. The results show that the increase in commuting time will aggrandize residents' tendency and expenditure of hedonic consumption. Moreover, we conduct situational experiments as a supplement to verify the main effect and mediation mechanism to exclude alternative explanations. The mechanism analyses prove that the perceived stress caused by long commuting time is a possible mediator for hedonic consumption. This study enriches the relative studies on social influences of commute, especially proving that this social issue may provide some benefits for business practice.