Hedonic investment

Investing and consuming may not be so different as traditional economic theory has understood them. The consumer research literature has begun to view consumption not simply as rational decisionmaking, but as a more multisensory activity in which emotion and fantasy play important, if not essential, roles. This new perspective has been extended by Holt (1995) in a matrix of metaphors in which consumption can be viewed as an interaction with objects and/or other persons as an end in itself and/or a means toward toward other ends. This paper theorizes how this matrix might apply to investment and uses a literary analysis of the best-selling The Motley Fool Investment Guide to examine whether or not our knowledge of consumers might in this way inform our understanding of investors.