Compulsive buying: Concept and measurement

This article investigates the probable causes of compulsive buying, proposes a conceptual framework to explain the phenomenon, and develops an appropriate measuring scale. The results of the analysis testify to the reliability and validity of the scale which was administered to 76 consumers.

---

Begriffliche und empirische Erfassung von zwanghaftem Kaufverhalten

Zusammenfassung Der Beitrag behandelt zwanghaftes Kaufverhalten als einen besonderen Verhaltenstyp, der aus dem Zusammenwirken dreier Kräfte erklärt wird, nämlich erstens einer starken emotionalen Aktivierung, zweitens einer hohen kognitiven Kontrolle und drittens einer hohen Reaktivität. Der wichtigste Unterschied zwischen zwanghaftem und impulsivem Kaufverhalten wird in den kognitiven Vorgängen gesehen, die eine Person dazu führen, die Wiedererlangung des affektiven Gleichgewichtes mit einem Kaufakt zu assoziieren. Genauere Unterschiede zwischen verschiedenen Kaufverhaltenstypen bietet Figur 1. Die Zusammenhänge, die zur Entstehung von zwanghaftem Kaufverhalten führen, werden in Figur 2 gezeigt. Aus diesen Zusammenhängen ergeben sich drei Hypothesen, die empirisch geprüft werden:1. Der zwanghafte Käufer ist im allgemeinen in höherem Maße ängstlich als ein durchschnittlicher Käufer. 2. Der zwanghafte Käufer hat tendenziell ein schwächeres Selbstbewußtsein. 3. Der zwanghafte Verbraucher hat häufiger ein Elternteil mit mißbräuchlichem Verbraucherverhalten.Zur Prüfung dieser Hypothesen wird eine Skala entwickelt, die in Tabelle I beschrieben ist und deren Reliabilität und Validität sich als befriedigend erweist. Außerdem dürfte sie eindimensional sein. Die Daten, die von 38 zwanghaften Käufern und einer gleichgroßen Zahl von durchschnittlichen Käufern stammen, stützen die erste und die dritte Hypothese, die zweite Hypothese konnte nicht bestätigt werden.

---

---

Gilles Valence and Alain d'Astous are Professors of Marketing, and Louis Fortier a graduate student, at the University of Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Québec J1K 2R1, Canada. The authors would like to thank Mr. Claude Sevigny (A.C.E.F. Estrie) and Mr. Claude Boucher (C.L.S.C. SOC), as well as Mrs. Monique Croteau, for graciously helping to track down compulsive buyers.This paper was first presented at the XVIIth Annual Conference of the European Marketing Academy, Bradford, England, April 5–8, 1988. A French version of the paper will be published in Recherches et applications en Marketing.     

Don't stop with the one-stop shop: Foreign investment in a liberalizing third world

Developing countries around the world are liberalizing their trade and investment regimes. This paper, based on a multiyear, multicountry study, assesses the likely impact of these new trade and investment policies on foreign investment projects. It points to the divergence between rhetoric and reality that often characterizes the new investment policies and institutions. Indeed, the study suggests that, for many foreign investors, changes in trade policy are likely to be more significant than changes in investment policy. The paper provides recommendations to investors on how to take advantage of the new policies they are likely to encounter in developing countries. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Does experience imply learning?

Research summary : Research traditionally uses experiential learning arguments to explain the existence of a positive relationship between repetition of an activity and performance. We propose an additional interpretation of this relationship in the context of discrete corporate development activities. We argue that firms choose to repeat successful activities, thereby accumulating high experience with them. Data on 437 aircraft projects introduced through three governance modes show that the positive performance effect of the firm's experience with the focal mode becomes insignificant after accounting for experience endogeneity. We suggest that in a general case, experience with corporate development activities may be tinged with both learning and selection effects. Therefore, omitting to account for experience endogeneity may lead to incorrect conclusions from an “empirically observed” positive experience–performance relationship. Managerial summary : This paper emphasizes that firms generally choose to undertake the corporate development activities (new product introductions, diversification moves, international expansions, alliances, acquisitions, etc.) with which they have been the most successful in the past and that they expect to be the most successful in the future. Hence, if a firm possesses certain capabilities, it will repeatedly engage in certain activities corresponding to those capabilities, thereby simultaneously achieving high levels of activity experience as well as superior activity performance. This view suggests that an “empirically observed” positive experience–performance relationship may not be due solely to learning‐based enhanced capabilities but may also be driven by astute self‐selection. Overall, we provide a new interpretation of the relationship between experience and performance in the context of infrequent, heterogeneous, and causally‐ambiguous corporate development activities. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Risk aversion and framing effects

We present a new experimental evidence of how framing affects decisions in the context of a lottery choice experiment for measuring risk aversion. We investigate framing effects by replicating the Holt and Laury’s (Am. Econ. Rev. 92:1644–1655, 2002) procedure for measuring risk aversion under various frames. We first examine treatments where participants are confronted with the 10 decisions to be made either simultaneously or sequentially. The second treatment variable is the order of appearance of the ten lottery pairs. Probabilities of winning are ranked either in increasing, decreasing, or in random order. Lastly, payoffs were increased by a factor of ten in additional treatments. The rate of inconsistencies was significantly higher in sequential than in simultaneous treatment, in increasing and random than in decreasing treatment. Both experience and salient incentives induce a dramatic decrease in inconsistent behaviors. On the other hand, risk aversion was significantly higher in sequential than in simultaneous treatment, in decreasing and random than in increasing treatment, in high than in low payoff condition. These findings suggest that subjects use available information which has no value for normative theories, like throwing a glance at the whole connected set of pairwise choices before making each decision in a connected set of lottery pairs.     

True indexes and rational habit formation

In this paper we discuss the construction of true indexes when tastes change endogenously. True indexes take the substitution possibilities of the consumer to a changing economic situation into account when equating the utility level of a particular period to the utility level attained in the base period through an appropriate change in income or the wage level. When tastes change endogenously, the current decision depends on the past history of consumption but, by the same token, the future path of consumption will depend on the current choice. In a true index, these intertemporal links of the current decision have to be taken into account. For a particular specification of the habit formation process, this is achieved by an appropriate transformation of prices and expenditures. A true intertemporal wage index is computed for the period 1946–1967 in the U.S. Because of increasing needs and intertemporal rationality, this index is roughly constant and equal to 1: real wages remained constant!