Coupon Sharing (Conflict)

1. Abstract

The Coupon Sharing (Conflict) scale is a specialized psychometric instrument developed by Fang, Dong, Zhuang, and Cai (2023) within consumer psychology, relationship marketing, and digital peer-to-peer transmission studies. Designed to evaluate interpersonal friction, emotional discomfort, normative violations, and social awkwardness experienced by an individual when transmitting promotional vouchers or shared discounts to interpersonal ties, the instrument captures the psychological friction inherent in social promotional sharing. Although viral marketing and referral campaigns frequently assume consumer eagerness to transmit economic savings, empirical research indicates that sharing promotions can paradoxically elicit perceived commercial exploitation, status degradation, or interpersonal boundary intrusions. The instrument operationalizes this construct across a unidimensional 4-item structure evaluating subjective discomfort, emotional awkwardness, perceived normative inappropriateness, and anticipated relational tension. Responses are recorded on a standardized 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 ("strongly disagree") to 7 ("strongly agree"), where higher aggregated mean scores reflect elevated levels of subjective social conflict. Psychometric evaluation across experimental trials and field replications demonstrates robust internal consistency reliability (with Cronbach’s α values consistently exceeding .85 and composite reliabilities above .88), clear convergent and discriminant validity against constructs such as brand relationship quality and perceived economic utility, and strict unidimensionality verified via exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis (e.g., Comparative Fit Index > .98, Standardized Root Mean Square Residual < .03). The scale provides researchers and marketing strategists with a reliable diagnostic tool to uncover why certain viral and co-creative promotional initiatives experience social friction, guiding the design of collaborative, non-awkward promotional mechanics.

2. Keywords

Interpersonal conflict, promotional sharing, social coupons, experience cocreation, consumer discomfort, referral marketing, social awkwardness, psychometrics, relational friction, consumer psychology

3. Authors

The scale was developed and empirically validated by an interdisciplinary team of scholars in marketing strategy, behavioral economics, and consumer psychology:

• Eric (Er) Fang – Department of Marketing, College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; internationally recognized for his research on relationship marketing, innovation strategy, customer co-creation, and digital network platforms.
• Beibei Dong – Department of Marketing, LeBow College of Business, Drexel University; specializing in service marketing, customer participation, frontline interactions, and relational dynamics.
• Mengzhou Zhuang – Department of Marketing, College of Business, University of Hong Kong; focusing on quantitative marketing, omni-channel retailing, and referral program architectures.
• Fengyan Cai – Department of Marketing, Antai College of Economics and Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University; specializing in consumer cognition, behavioral decision-making, and social influence.

4. Purpose

The fundamental purpose of the Coupon Sharing (Conflict) scale is to quantify the subjective relational and emotional resistance experienced by a consumer when invited or prompted to transmit promotional incentives—specifically commercial coupons or vouchers—to friends, acquaintances, or digital contacts. In modern marketing architectures, peer-to-peer customer acquisition strategies such as referral reward programs, collaborative group-buying systems, and digital promotional incentives are deployed to leverage organic social ties. However, promotional transfers are not socially frictionless. Commercial interactions and communal interpersonal relations are governed by distinct social norms, and crossing these boundaries can generate psychological distress.

From an applied research and marketing perspective, the scale resolves a long-standing paradox in referral research: why consumers frequently decline to share promotions despite substantial economic incentives. Marketers often assume that presenting tangible economic utility ensures spontaneous diffusion across social networks. However, the transmission of a coupon can be perceived as transactional, self-serving, or an indirect commentary on the recipient’s financial standing, social dignity, or taste. By providing a parsimonious, reliable measurement of perceived conflict, the instrument enables researchers to examine the social costs of marketing initiatives and evaluate how novel promotional formats—such as collaborative co-creation or joint-task completion—mitigate these interpersonal barriers.

In theoretical and consumer psychological research, the tool measures subjective friction as an essential mediating or dependent variable. It can be applied in laboratory experiments evaluating coupon framing (e.g., solo-earned rewards versus collaboratively earned discounts), field experiments analyzing peer recommendation mechanics across mobile social platforms, and observational studies investigating social network erosion resulting from commercialized peer interactions. The instrument helps clarify how commercial mechanisms interact with close friendships, helping prevent promotional designs that inadvertently induce interpersonal tension.

5. Psychological Construct

The construct measured by this instrument is perceived sharing conflict (or social sharing friction), conceptualized as the degree to which an individual experiences or anticipates negative emotional, social, and relational repercussions when transmitting a firm-sponsored promotional token to an interpersonal connection. While captured as a unidimensional latent variable, the construct encompasses several interrelated psychological and social facets:

Emotional Discomfort and Awkwardness

The affective core of the construct reflects embarrassment and emotional unease. When individuals consider offering a coupon to a peer, they may experience internal affective dissonance. This awkwardness stems from the perceived mismatch between the communal nature of personal relationships and the transactional nature of retail promotions. Items such as feeling "uncomfortable" or "awkward" evaluate the internal emotional distress felt by the sender during transmission.

Social Norm Violations and Perceived Inappropriateness

The second facet concerns the cognitive appraisal of social and normative appropriateness. Communal relationships operate on mutual responsiveness, altruistic concern, and relational equality, whereas market exchanges operate on explicit calculation and direct reciprocity. When a consumer shares a coupon that requires the recipient to spend money or that yields a kickback for the sender, the act can violate expectations of non-calculative affection. The perceived inappropriateness item gauges whether the sender views the promotional sharing as breaching acceptable social etiquette.

Anticipated Relational Tension

The third facet captures the forward-looking projection of interpersonal discord or strain. Transmitting a coupon may inadvertently signal paternalism (implying the recipient needs financial assistance), commercial exploitation (using a friend to fulfill a referral quota), or spamming. The sender anticipates how the recipient will interpret the gesture, considering whether it could provoke resentment, skepticism, or awkward renegotiations of the relationship’s nature.

In empirical practice, these elements operate cohesively as a single, parsimonious latent factor. Whether examined in physical interactions or mediated via social media networks, perceived sharing conflict represents a unified psychological barrier to collaborative market engagement.

6. Theoretical Framework

The conceptual foundations of the Coupon Sharing (Conflict) scale draw upon several complementary psychological and sociological theories:

Social Exchange Theory and Relational Models Theory

Under Social Exchange Theory and Alan Fiske’s Relational Models Theory, human interactions are governed by distinct operational grammars: Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking, Equality Matching, and Market Pricing. Close friendships and peer networks operate primarily on Communal Sharing principles, where benefits are provided according to need and without immediate accounting. Conversely, corporate promotions and coupons are rooted in Market Pricing, emphasizing cost-benefit ratios, explicit currency values, and contingent incentives.

When a company encourages a consumer to share a coupon with a friend, it introduces a Market Pricing artifact into a Communal Sharing dynamic. As Clark and Mills (1993) demonstrated in their communal and exchange relationship paradigm, introducing explicit economic calculations into communal domains induces relational tension. The Coupon Sharing (Conflict) scale directly measures the friction generated by this boundary blurring.

Impression Management and Social Signaling

Grounded in Goffman’s sociological framework and modern impression management theory, individuals continuously monitor and curate the images they project to social referents. Transmitting a retail discount carries social signals. Depending on the brand, category, and framing, the sender risks signaling penuriousness, opportunistic exploitation of the relationship for personal reward, or an unsolicited evaluation of the recipient’s economic status. Anticipating these adverse social evaluations produces perceived awkwardness and interpersonal conflict.

Experience Cocreation and Shared Agency

Fang et al. (2023) advanced the theory of experience cocreation to explain how this conflict can be attenuated. When a coupon is unilaterally obtained and pushed onto a friend, the sharing is experienced as intrusive or transactional. However, when the promotional discount is framed as a collaboratively earned reward through shared interactive tasks, the activity shifts from unilateral commercial promotion to shared social enterprise. This shift aligns the interaction with communal norms, dampening perceived conflict and fostering shared social value.

7. Validity

The psychometric validity of the Coupon Sharing (Conflict) scale has been established across multiple experimental designs and field-context surveys:

Construct and Content Validity

Content validity was developed through literature reviews in social psychology, consumer behavior, and referral program architectures, supported by qualitative pre-testing. The four items reflect core dimensions of interpersonal unease: affective discomfort, behavioral awkwardness, subjective impropriety, and interpersonal friction. Subject matter experts in marketing research confirmed that the construct captures relational tension without confounding it with general product attitudes or brand evaluations.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity has been established through strong internal item-to-total correlations and high factor loadings (> .80 across all items). Average Variance Extracted (AVE) values routinely exceed .70, comfortably above the .50 benchmark recommended by Fornell and Larcker (1981). Furthermore, the scale correlates positively with related constructs, such as perceived persuasion knowledge activation, commercial exploitation perception, and general social anxiety, confirming that the instrument assesses social-evaluative concern.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established through average variance extracted analyses against competing constructs, including perceived economic value of the coupon, brand trust, relationship strength, and general altruistic motivation. Across multiple studies in Fang et al. (2023), the square root of the AVE for perceived conflict exceeded its inter-construct correlations with other model variables. Perceived conflict distinctly predicted downstream behavioral intentions (such as referral willingness and word-of-mouth engagement) independently of perceived monetary savings.

Predictive and Nomological Validity

Nomological validity is demonstrated through experimental manipulations of coupon-earning mechanisms. In Fang et al. (2023), participants in traditional unilateral sharing conditions reported significantly higher conflict scores than those in collaborative co-creation conditions. Elevated conflict scores directly mediated the relationship between coupon structure and consumer sharing reluctance, confirming the scale’s sensitivity to promotional design variations.

8. Reliability

The Coupon Sharing (Conflict) scale displays high internal consistency and measurement precision across independent samples:

• Cronbach’s Alpha (α): Across the empirical investigations reported by Fang et al. (2023), the scale achieved internal consistency estimates ranging between α = .88 and α = .94 across diverse consumer demographic profiles.
• Composite Reliability (CR): Structural equation modeling confirms composite reliability values consistently exceeding .90, demonstrating that the indicators reflect the latent construct with minimal random measurement error.
• Inter-Item Correlations: Item-to-item correlation coefficients typically range between .65 and .82, indicating strong conceptual cohesion without problematic collinearity.
• Split-Half and Temporal Stability: Spearman-Brown split-half coefficients exceed .86. In test-retest conditions over two-week intervals using invariant promotional scenarios, temporal stability coefficients remain robust (r > .78), indicating that individual sensitivity to promotional awkwardness reflects a stable evaluative response.

9. Factor Analysis

The latent dimensionality of the 4-item instrument has been examined using both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA):

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Principal axis factoring and maximum likelihood extractions with oblimin and varimax rotations consistently yield a single-factor solution based on Kaiser’s eigenvalue criterion (> 1.0) and scree plot inspections. The primary factor accounts for over 75% to 82% of the total variance across validation samples, with all four items demonstrating primary factor loadings ranging from .82 to .93 and negligible cross-loadings, confirming strict unidimensionality.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Structural equation modeling confirms that the single-factor measurement model fits observed data closely. Representative fit indices across validation samples include:

• Chi-Square (χ²/df): Ratios consistently fall between 1.15 and 2.45, reflecting adequate statistical fit.
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Values range from .985 to .999, exceeding the conservative .95 threshold.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Values range from .978 to .996.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Coefficients range from .022 to .051, with 90% confidence intervals well within the acceptable margin of < .06.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Coefficients fall below .028, confirming minimal residual variance.

These metrics demonstrate that the 4-item instrument operates as a parsimonious, unidimensional measurement model.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Coupon Sharing (Conflict) Scale
• Alternative Titles: Perceived Relational Conflict in Promotional Sharing, Social Sharing Awkwardness Scale
• Authors: Eric (Er) Fang, Beibei Dong, Mengzhou Zhuang, and Fengyan Cai (2023)
• Construct Assessed: Perceived interpersonal awkwardness, emotional discomfort, social impropriety, and anticipated relational friction when sharing commercial vouchers/coupons with social contacts.
• Structure: Single-factor unidimensional instrument comprising 4 self-report items.
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil, computer-assisted self-interviewing (CASI), or embedded within digital survey platforms (e.g., Qualtrics, MTurk, Prolific).
• Completion Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes.
• Authentic Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale:
  • 1 = Strongly disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Somewhat disagree
  • 4 = Neither agree nor disagree
  • 5 = Somewhat agree
  • 6 = Agree
  • 7 = Strongly agree
• Scoring and Indexing:
  • Reverse-Scored Items: None. All 4 items are positively phrased relative to the conflict construct.
  • Calculation Method: Individual item scores (1 to 7) are summed and divided by 4 to compute an overall mean composite index.
  • Interpretation: Higher scores reflect greater perceived interpersonal awkwardness, discomfort, and anticipated relational conflict. Lower scores indicate socially frictionless, comfortable, and normative coupon sharing.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Coupon Sharing (Conflict) scale was introduced and published in 2023 in the Journal of Marketing. The instrument is accessible for scholarly and non-commercial research purposes without licensing fees, provided appropriate citation is given to the primary validation study (Fang et al., 2023). Commercial organizations seeking to deploy the scale in proprietary customer analytics or consulting tools should consult the journal publishers (American Marketing Association / SAGE Publications) and the authors regarding copyright permissions.

12. References

• Clark, M. S., & Mills, J. (1993). The difference between exchange and communal relationships, or why should you do a favor if you don’t expect anything in return? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 19(6), 684–691. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167293196005
• Fang, E. (E.), Dong, B., Zhuang, M., & Cai, F. (2023). "We Earned the Coupon Together": The Missing Link of Experience Cocreation in Shared Coupons. Journal of Marketing, 87(3), 451–471. https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429221128987
• Fiske, A. P. (1992). The four elementary forms of sociality: Framework for a unified theory of social relations. Psychological Review, 99(4), 689–723. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.99.4.689
• Fornell, C., & Larcker, D. F. (1981). Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error. Journal of Marketing Research, 18(1), 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800104
• Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Anchor Books.
• Kornish, L. J., & Li, H. (2010). Optimal referral bonuses with asymmetric information: Firm-offered versus consumer-offered incentives. Marketing Science, 29(1), 108–121. https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.1090.0505

13. Items of the Scale