Compulsive Buying Disorder

Faber and O'Guinn (1992) developed the Compulsive Buying Scale that became the field's reference instrument. DeSarbo and Edwards (1996) further differentiated the population into two clusters: a higher-arousal impulse cluster, closer to behavioral addiction, and a lower-arousal reactive cluster, where the behavior functions primarily as a chronic affect-regulation strategy. Workman and Paper (2010) reviewed the cross-disciplinary literature. In e-commerce data the CBD signature includes inverted frequency-to-value ratios (high transaction count, low average basket value with a long right tail), elevated return rates two to three times the platform median, payment-method oscillation, and return-then-repurchase overlap exceeding 60 percent. The ethically appropriate response from a retailer is suppression of aggressive marketing pressure, not activation; the population is clinical, not commercial.