MENTAL ACCOUNTING THEORY AND FINANCIAL DECISION-MAKING BEHAVIOR IN INDONESIA: A SECONDARY-DATA ANALYSIS OF INVESTOR DIVIDEND PREFERENCE AND THE FINANCIAL LITERACY-INCLUSION GAP
Keywords:
mental accounting, behavioral accounting, behavioral finance, dividend preference, financial literacy, financial inclusion, secondary data.Abstract
Mental accounting, the cognitive process through which individuals compartmentalize money into separate, non-fungible categories according to its source or intended use, has become a foundational concept in behavioral finance and behavioral accounting research. This study examines how mental accounting manifests in Indonesian financial behavior at two levels: household financial management and capital-market investor behavior, drawing entirely on secondary data published by national authorities and prior empirical studies. At the household level, the 2025 National Survey of Financial Literacy and Inclusion (SNLIK), jointly conducted by the Financial Services Authority (OJK) and Statistics Indonesia (BPS), reports a financial literacy index of 66.46 percent against a considerably higher financial inclusion index of 80.51 percent, a gap that widened further from the 2024 figures of 65.43 and 75.02 percent respectively. This persistent literacy-inclusion gap is interpreted through a mental accounting lens as evidence that households increasingly hold and use formal financial products without a corresponding capacity to integrate them into a single, fungible financial plan. At the capital-market level, prior Indonesian studies of investors on the Indonesia Stock Exchange find that investors treat dividend income and capital gains as separate mental accounts, remaining willing to spend dividends while reluctant to realize equivalent value through selling shares, and that this preference is consistent with the classical bird-in-hand explanation for cash dividend demand. The study concludes that mental accounting offers a coherent behavioral explanation linking two apparently distinct phenomena in Indonesia's financial system, household underutilization of financial literacy gains and continued corporate emphasis on cash dividend policy, and that both accounting disclosure practice and financial education policy would benefit from explicitly accounting for these non-fungible money categories rather than assuming rational, integrated financial decision-making.
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