Der Einkauf von Waren oder Dienstleistungen, die man teilen möchte, ist deutlich stressiger als der Einkauf für sich selbst oder für etwas, das man einer anderen Person schenken möchte, denn „man fühlt sich verantwortlicher und weniger sicher, dass man damit gute Arbeit leisten kann.“

>Purchases for sharing may include selecting an Airbnb or a hotel for a family getaway, the restaurant for a romantic date, the snacks for a book club meeting, or even the kind of beer to be consumed with friends during the big game.
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>“You feel more responsible when you’re making these sorts of decisions and you feel less confident about your ability to do a good job with it, so you worry about getting it wrong when there is a strong desire to make both of you happy,” said Campbell, an expert on consumer psychology who holds the Anderson Presidential Chair in Business at UCR.

>The study involved more than 2,000 participants who ranked their levels of anxiety after they considered various purchasing scenarios or made choices for solo or joint consumption. Among other situations, the participants had to choose healthy drinks for meetings, snacks for movies, wine for a friend’s promotion party, and more complex decisions, such as picking activities to do while traveling.
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>The results showed that purchasing goods or services to be shared generates significantly more anxiety—especially when the decision-maker doesn’t know the other person’s preferences or expects them to be different than their own. The increased stress did not appear to be related to the difficulty of the decision.
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>“What’s fascinating is that the anxiety doesn’t stem from the choice being harder—it’s not about decision difficulty,” Campbell said. “It’s about the added emotional weight of responsibility.”
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>But knowing more about others’ preferences reduced the stress and increased confidence, the results showed—except when a consumer learned that those they would share with had different preferences from their own.
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>“People felt better about the choice when they weren’t guessing,” Campbell said, “except if they knew they couldn’t please everyone.”

[EXPRESS: The Decision-making Process and Impact of Individual Decisions for Joint Consumption – Sharaya M. Jones, Margaret C. Campbell, 2025](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00222437251389950)