In particular, mental accounting is one way in which we strengthen our ability to delay gratification.
And there are parts of the economy where the effects of mental accounting are far from benign.
And that process of mental accounting ends up having a profound effect on the way we spend and invest.
By creating budgets with categories of funds, investors may gain psychological benefits from the mental accounting behind the bucket strategy.
Ultimately, much of mental accounting stems from our recognition that we are not as strong as we wish we were.
This study claims it is subconscious mental accounting, whereby investors view dividends and capital gains in two completely separate buckets.
In other ways, though, mental accounting often turns out to be a useful way of controlling our own weaknesses and foibles.
Mental accounting, for instance, helps explain investors' well-known tendency to sell winners too early and to hold on to losers too long--because we don't treat gains or losses as real until we actually sell the stock.
For example, mental accounting contributed to the large increase in stock prices in the 1990s, as many people took on more and more risk with the justification that they were only playing only with gains from the past few years.
In the words of the behavioral economist Richard Thaler, we engage in "mental accounting, " putting our money in different accounts based on how we earned it, how easily we can access it, how long we've had it and so on.
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