Ego depletion in consumer behavior: A review, synthesis, and research agenda

Abstract

This research aims to identify, analyze, and map the intellectual structure of the topic of ego depletion in consumer behavior through the bibliometric strategies of namely co-citation analysis and bibliographic coupling. We performed the co-citation analysis covering 20 years of research, divided into two 10-year analyses. The bibliographic coupling analysis focused on recent research covering the last decade, divided into two five-year analyses. The results presented the most important research, authors, research centers, and journals on the topic, as well as the factors derived from the co-citation and bibliographic coupling analysis, the evolution of the theme between the analysis and subsequent periods, and the agenda for future research. The main contribution of this article is the proposition of an agenda for future research on ego depletion and its effects on consumer behavior. | INTRODUCTIONSeveral fields have studied ego depletion (ED), including psychology and marketing . Initially, Baumeister et al. (1998) empirically presented ED and referred to the ego depletion strength model, which is defined as the decrease in ego resources after self-regulatory tasks . The current literature presents improved definitions of ED, such as the ego depletion processing model, which states that the ED mechanism is triggered by temporary changes in motivation and attention that affect subsequent self-control .The ED literature originated in psychology (Baumeister et al., 1998).ED incorporated marketing, particularly in studies of consumer behavior (CB), to understand how reducing self-regulation affects consumer goals . ED and its effects on CB have been widely studied in the current literature (Hildebrand et al., 2021).According to Reynolds and McCrea (2016), several studies published in recent years have discussed ED, and ED is one of the best-documented models of self-control in the literature. In researching the topic in the Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Science (WoS) and Elsevier's Scopus databases, we found 2275 manuscripts (1590 and 685, respectively). Analyzing the studies published in the WoS, Scopus, and Google Scholar databases, we did not identify any bibliometric study on ED or relating ED and CB. This gap in the literature motivated the present study.Encouraged by the relevance of the study of the theme (Reynolds & McCrea, 2016) and by the lack of bibliometric research on ED in CB, we propose the objectives of this research: to identify, analyze, and map its intellectual structure from its origin to the present day, to establish its state of the art and future research trends. Table 1 presents the research questions based on the objectives. From the established objectives, we understand that the accuracy of bibliometric strategies of co-citation "connects documents, authors, or journals based on joint appearances in reference lists" and bibliographic coupling "connects documents, authors, or journals based on the number of shared references." We followed the recommendations for bibliometric research in A...