KOLKATA: Shopping is over and you're headed to the billing counter when something snazzy catches your eye. The final bill is done only after you buy that expensive dress which you hadn't planned to buy at all! By the time you walk out of the mall, the euphoria has given way to guilt. This, in short, is an example of impulse buying , which has traditionally always been associated with women, but here's news.Researchers at IIT Kharagpur have tried to prove that both men and women are equally prone to impulse buying but women are typically prone to a sense of guilt at the end, which doesn't happen in case of men. The research article has been published in the UK-based Emerald Insight - considered to be a leading journal in management research. Interestingly, it has also been adjudged as the best original research of 2018 and awarded with the Emerald Literati award.The researchers interviewed shoppers at several malls spread across Kolkata and tried to map how often men and women indulge in impulse shopping and why.They have analysed the impulse buying pattern and have tried to plot these on behavioural graphs to arrive at conclusions. The survey and the derivatives were spread over five stages : problem/need recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision and post-purchase behaviour."When it comes to impulse buying, intermediate stages are skipped and the first stage is immediately followed by the penultimate stage, that is, purchase decision. We have tried to link this impulse to personality traits such as lack of control, stress reaction and absorption, which can be related to internal (positive or negative feelings) and environmental/sensory cues," said Sangeeta Sawhney, faculty of business studies at the Vinod Gupta School of Management (VGSOM), the B-school of IIT-Kharagpur. She has led the year-long research, along with Gyan Prakash, Soujanya Kodati and Archana Srivastava.The research has arrived primarily at two thinking processes which are generally responsible for impulse buying - affective and cognitive processes. While affective processes refer an irresistible urge to buy, mood changes and positive emotions, cognitive processes include deliberations, unplanned buying, etc.Results show that on affective component yardsticks like irresistible urge to buy (3.5 in males vs 3.7 in women), positive buying emotion (3.3 and 3.7) and mood management (2.7 and 3), the results are more or less the same for both men and women. There is a further blurring of lines in cognitive component yardsticks like cognitive deliberation (2.7 and 2.7), unplanned buying (3.4 and 3.3) and disregard for the future (2.8 and 2.6).