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1. Introduction
Impulsive buying without careful planning has become a daily occurrence all over the world. Some studies show that nearly 62% of supermarket sales are contributed by consumers' impulse purchases, and about 80% of goods are on the list of impulse purchases (Luo, 2005). Almost no product line is affected by impulse buying (Bellenger et al., 1978). Previous efforts to shed light on impulsive buying behavior have focused on the context of single person shopping. Few studies have explored how impulse buying occurs when shopping with others. In fact, in collectivist culture countries, such as China, it is common for consumers to go shopping with family or friends in their spare time (Xiong and Jing, 2009). Try to imagine the following scenario: you go shopping with your friends at the weekend and find that a shopping mall is celebrating its tenth anniversary, and all products are sold at a 50% discount to reward consumers. In the face of unexpected commodity temptations or marketing incentives, you and your partner may react in the following ways: both want to buy, neither want to buy nor one person wants to buy and the other person does not. The interest of this study lies in the following questions: if the initial impulse of consumers who are shopping together is obviously different, will the impulse purchase of consumers occur? If it does happen, what is the internal decision-making mechanism of impulse purchase?
The desire–willpower model conceptualizes the occurrence of impulse purchase as a struggle between desire and willpower. If the desire to buy triumphs over willpower, indicating the failure of self-control, then impulse buying will occur (Hoch and Loewenstein, 1991; Baumeister and Heatherton, 1996). As for the failure of self-control, according to the theory of self-regulatory resource depletion, self-control resources are as universal and limited as the water in the reservoir. When people engage in other activities that consume self-control resources, their self-control ability will decline. If people encounter the temptation of goods at this time, it is easy to buy on impulse (Baumeister and Heatherton, 1996; Baumeister, 2002; Vohs and Faber, 2007). The limitation of the theory lies in the premise of its existence, that is people have carried out a series of activities in advance and...