Conceptualizing and measuring pathways for how object attachment affects willingness to pay (WTP)

This article presents a conceptual perspective of the pathways through which object attachment can affect individuals’ willingness to pay (WTP) for an object. To introduce this perspective, we first provide an integrative overview of WTP as a comparative valuation that is constructed based on individual factors and comparative factors. We outline four general pathways through which these factors can affect WTP. We then discuss how object attachment can impact WTP through each of these pathways. Lastly, we point out that existing methods of measuring WTP cannot capture the comparative pathways, and we introduce to the reader a WTP method that is capable of assessing these pathways.