Gerhard Scherhorn, Lucia A. Reisch, and Gerhard Raab Addictive Buying in West Germany: An Empirical Study ABSTRACT. Subsequent to a previous article in JCP (Scherhorn, 1990) outlining a theoretical approach to addictive buying, the authors report on the results of their empirical study of addictive buyers in West Germany. The study indicates that addictive buying is clearly one kind of addiction which may be substituted by other addictions, may take the place of another addietion, or even alternate with other forms of addiction. At the same time, there is substantial evidence that there are special key experiences to which the propensity to addictive buying can be traced. Addictive buyers have been subjected to a specific form of distortion of autonomy: They have felt that for patents, relatives, or neighbours, material goods (money, property, consumer goods) seemed to be more relevant and more important than they themselves. Thus, they have acquired a strong predisposition for using con- sumer goods as a favourite means of compensating for the lack of self-esteem from which they suffer. This predisposition, however, is reinforced by the fact that consumption and buying increasingly take on the role of a socially favoured means of compensation. As mentioned in the first report on our research project on addictive buying (Scherhorn, 1990), an empirical investigation of the pheno- menon of addictive spending has been carried out in West Germany. Other authors referred to below call this phenomenon "compulsive consumption." Since we conceptualize out object of investigation as an addiction rather than a compulsive-obsessive behaviour, and since we focus on buying rather than consumption behaviour, we prefer to use the term "addictive buying" (Scherhorn, 1990, p. 34). The theoretical considerations described at length in the previous paper were transformed into concrete and detailed research hypotheses in order to investigate empirically the addictive buying phenomenon and to trace back the key experiences of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, in order to relate these experiences to both the buyer's individual socialization and the societal conditions under which buying took place. The purpose of the first European research project on this subject was threefold. JournalofConsumerPolicy 13: 355--387, 1990. © 1990 KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.