Customer Special Treatment Entitlement Scale

1. Abstract

The Customer Special Treatment Entitlement Scale (CSTE) is a self-report psychometric instrument developed by consumer behavior scholars Rebecca Walker Reczek, Kelly L. Haws, and Christopher A. Summers (2014) to assess the degree to which an individual believes they have earned, deserve, and possess a legitimate right to preferential or differentiated treatment from a commercial firm. Originating in empirical investigations of loyalty reward programs and the psychological phenomenon termed "lucky loyalty," the scale captures a distinct form of earned psychological entitlement grounded in perceived reciprocal obligation. Unlike general, chronic, or narcissistic entitlement, which manifests as an pervasive expectation of unearned privilege across social domains, customer special treatment entitlement reflects an earned, domain-specific state arising from perceived customer investments, including patronage history, accumulated spending, loyalty program tier status, and relational effort. The instrument comprises four unidimensional items evaluated via an authentic 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 7 (Strongly Agree). Psychometric evaluations demonstrate high internal consistency (Cronbach's α typically exceeding .88 across experimental cohorts), robust convergent validity with consumer investment indicators, and clear discriminant validity from generalized psychological entitlement, brand attachment, and brand love. Confirmatory factor analysis substantiates an invariant single-factor structure with standardized factor loadings consistently surpassing .80. The scale provides marketing scientists, consumer psychologists, and service researchers with an operationalization of customer expectations of privileged service, facilitating empirical inquiries into consumer responses to loyalty promotions, service failures, random promotional drawings, and perceived relational justice.

2. Keywords

Customer Special Treatment Entitlement, Lucky Loyalty, Consumer Entitlement, Equity Theory, Psychological Entitlement, Reciprocity Norm, Customer Loyalty Programs, Preferential Treatment, Consumer Effort, Perceived Deservingness

3. Authors

The Customer Special Treatment Entitlement Scale was developed and validated by:

• Rebecca Walker Reczek, Ph.D. — Berry Chair in New Technologies in Marketing and Professor of Marketing at the Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University. Her research focuses on consumer behavior, ethical decision-making, consumer inferences, and loyalty programs.
• Kelly L. Haws, Ph.D. — Anne Marie and Thomas B. Walker, Jr. Chair and Professor of Marketing at the Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University. Her expertise encompasses consumer self-control, behavioral economics, food decision-making, and consumer entitlement.
• Christopher A. Summers, Ph.D. — Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Darla Moore School of Business, University of South Carolina. His scholarship explores consumer psychology, advertising effectiveness, and subjective probability assessments.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Customer Special Treatment Entitlement Scale is to quantify the psychological sense of deservingness and reciprocal expectation that consumers develop toward a specific commercial organization. Modern marketing strategies frequently encourage consumers to invest non-monetary effort, transactional loyalty, and cognitive attention into loyalty programs under the implicit or explicit promise of future rewards. When consumers comply by concentrating purchases, interacting with brand platforms, or advancing through tiered loyalty hierarchies, they undergo a psychological transformation regarding their standing relative to other patrons. The CSTE captures the specific cognitive and affective manifestation of this perceived status.

In academic research, the instrument serves to clarify how customer entitlement biases consumer cognition and downstream behavior. A principal empirical context in which the scale was introduced was the "lucky loyalty" effect, wherein consumers who exerted effort toward a brand developed an irrational belief that they were more likely to win randomly determined promotional outcomes (e.g., sweepstakes, product giveaways, random upgrade selections) sponsored by that brand. The CSTE provides the critical mediating mechanism explaining this cognitive distortion: consumers infer that their effort warrants acknowledgment from the firm, fostering an underlying belief in special treatment that subconsciously biases subjective probability estimates of purely stochastic events.

Beyond promotional probability estimates, the scale addresses critical questions in service management and relationship marketing. Clinical and applied research applications include:

• Service Failure and Recovery Dynamics: Assessing how baseline levels of customer special treatment entitlement exacerbate service failure dissatisfaction and influence the acceptability of compensatory recovery offerings.
• Loyalty Program Tier Structuring: Investigating the boundary conditions under which hierarchical tier progression cultivates functional relationship building versus dysfunctional, demanding customer behaviors.
• Frontline Employee Well-Being: Evaluating how entitled customer segments interact with service personnel, including the emergence of unreasonable service demands, verbal aggression, or refusal to follow standard retail policies.
• Promotional Gamification: Analyzing how effort-based gamified marketing mechanics inadvertently activate entitlement heuristics, altering customer expectations regarding firm obligations.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct captured by the CSTE is customer special treatment entitlement, conceptualized as a subjective, earned, and domain-specific belief that one has accrued a legitimate right to preferential service, prioritized resources, and unique accommodations from a target firm. This construct sits at the intersection of consumer psychology, social exchange dynamics, and justice perceptions.

Earned vs. Pervasive Entitlement

In psychological literature, entitlement is frequently conceptualized as a stable, personality-level trait characterized by pervasive, unearned expectations of favorable outcomes without commensurate reciprocal contribution (Campbell et al., 2004). Trait entitlement is closely linked to subclinical narcissism, interpersonal exploitation, and inflated self-regard. In contrast, customer special treatment entitlement is strictly an earned, state-like or context-contingent construct. Consumers high in CSTE do not necessarily believe they are inherently superior human beings deserving of privilege across all life situations; rather, they believe that their specific relationship history, transactional investment, and behavioral loyalty with a focal firm have created an equitable imbalance that the firm is morally and socially obligated to repay through preferential accommodations.

Dimensions of Deserved Reciprocity

The CSTE models customer entitlement through four tightly intertwined cognitive-evaluative facets:

• Earned Status: The perception that prior effort, resource expenditure, or sustained patronage represents an earned input into the commercial relationship (operationalized via Item 1: "I have earned special treatment from this company").
• Comparative Deservingness: The normative judgment that the customer merits differentiated, elevated treatment relative to the broader population of generic or less-invested patrons (operationalized via Item 2: "I deserve preferential treatment from this company").
• Entitlement Consciousness: The subjective feeling of an authorized claim upon the company's attention, flexibility, or premium resources (operationalized via Item 3: "I feel entitled to special consideration from this company").
• Historical Rights Inferences: The rationalization that longitudinal brand association confers quasi-contractual rights to customized service and priority delivery (operationalized via Item 4: "Because of my history with this company, I have a right to expect preferential treatment").

6. Theoretical Framework

The CSTE is grounded in foundational social-psychological and economic frameworks governing interpersonal exchange, distributive equity, and cognitive heuristics.

Equity Theory

First articulated by J. Stacy Adams (1965), Equity Theory posits that individuals evaluate relationships by comparing the ratio of their internal inputs to external outcomes against the perceived ratio of a referent other. In consumer contexts, inputs encompass monetary outlay, relational tenure, brand advocacy, and cognitive or physical effort exerted to comply with loyalty program requirements. Outcomes encompass standard service delivery, promotional discounts, interpersonal respect, and preferential operational procedures. When a consumer expends substantial effort, they perceive a structural disparity in the input/outcome ratio. Consequently, they experience psychological tension that produces an expectation of compensating outcomes. The CSTE directly captures this perceived entitlement to compensating outcomes.

The Norm of Reciprocity

Grounded in Alvin Gouldner's (1960) sociological thesis on the universal norm of reciprocity, human social exchanges operate under the imperative that benefits received must be returned with commensurate benefits. In relationship marketing, firms deliberately cultivate communal and exchange partnerships with top-tier customers. Consumers internalize these corporate overtures through the lens of reciprocal social contracts: having fulfilled their role as loyal patrons, they perceive that the organization is socially bound to reciprocate with differentiated care, exclusive perks, and operational exceptions.

The Just World Belief and Effort Heuristics

The application of the CSTE within the "lucky loyalty" framework also draws upon Melvin Lerner's (1980) Just-World Hypothesis and effort heuristics (Kruger et al., 2004). Human decision-makers routinely harbor an implicit belief that the universe operates in a fair manner where effort and good deeds are inherently rewarded. When consumers expend effort in a brand ecosystem, the psychological need for cosmic or systemic fairness blends with commercial expectations. This leads to the irrational heuristic that their entitlement extends beyond deterministic service benefits to influence purely stochastic, randomly generated marketing outcomes.

7. Validity

Empirical evaluations across the consumer behavior and marketing literature confirm the robust psychometric validity of the Customer Special Treatment Entitlement Scale.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity has been demonstrated through strong, statistically significant correlations between CSTE scores and theoretically aligned constructs. In Reczek, Haws, and Summers (2014, Study 1 & Study 2), experimental manipulations of consumer effort (e.g., high-effort task completion versus low-effort or no-effort conditions) yielded significant main effects on the CSTE, confirming that the scale accurately registers variations in felt deservingness resulting from behavioral investments. Furthermore, CSTE exhibits strong positive correlations with measures of perceived relationship investment ($r = .54$ to $.68, p < .001$) and tier-based loyalty status identity.

Discriminant Validity

A critical psychometric hurdle for the CSTE involves establishing independence from Campbell et al.'s (2004) Psychological Entitlement Scale (PES). Discriminant validity was established through factor analytic and correlation analyses:

• The correlation between CSTE and general trait psychological entitlement is moderate to weak (typically $r = .18$ to $.28$), demonstrating that the CSTE does not merely reflect chronic narcissism or dispositional arrogance.
• When modeled concurrently in structural equation models, the average variance extracted (AVE) for CSTE consistently exceeds the square of its correlation with general entitlement, brand commitment, brand love, and perceived service quality.
• Controlled experiments show that manipulating firm-specific loyalty effort significantly shifts CSTE scores without altering trait PES scores, demonstrating state-like sensitivity to specific commercial exchanges.

Predictive and Nomological Validity

Nomological validity is substantiated by the scale's capacity to mediate key downstream consequences in experimental consumer research. Specifically, Reczek et al. (2014) showed that CSTE fully mediates the effect of consumer effort on subjective probability assessments of winning a random promotional drawing ($95% \text{ bootstrap CI } [.04, .28]$). In service recovery studies, high baseline CSTE scores reliably predict heightened customer outrage, vindictive complaint behavior, and diminished forgiveness following service failures when the failure involves an operational refusal to provide preferential treatment.

8. Reliability

The CSTE exhibits excellent internal consistency across diverse experimental, laboratory, and field contexts. In the foundational validation studies reported by Reczek, Haws, and Summers (2014):

• In an initial experimental study manipulating consumer effort in a frequent-shopper scenario ($N = 143$), the 4-item scale exhibited a Cronbach's alpha coefficient of α = .88.
• In a subsequent investigation involving actual college store customer loyalty programs ($N = 177$), the scale demonstrated a Cronbach's alpha of α = .91.
• Replication studies examining consumer reactions to airline loyalty programs and hotel rewards platforms have routinely reported internal consistency coefficients ranging between α = .89 and α = .94, with composite reliability ($
  ho_c$) routinely exceeding$.90$.
• Corrected item-total correlations across all four items uniformly exceed $.70$, indicating that each individual item contributes substantially to the overall measurement of customer entitlement without redundancy.

9. Factor Analysis

Both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) corroborate the strict unidimensionality of the Customer Special Treatment Entitlement Scale.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Principal components and maximum likelihood factor extraction methods conducted across multiple validation samples consistently extract a single dominant factor with an eigenvalue substantially greater than 1.0 (typically ranging from $3.12$ to $3.45$). This single factor accounts for over $78%$ of the total shared variance among the four items. Scree plot analyses consistently reveal a steep drop-off after the first component, confirming the absence of secondary dimensions.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Confirmatory factor analytic models evaluating the single-factor specification demonstrate exceptional goodness-of-fit indices when applied to empirical consumer data. Typical structural fit parameters include:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI) ≥ .99
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) ≥ .98
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) ≤ .045 (90% CI [.000, .085])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) ≤ .018
• Chi-Square to Degrees of Freedom Ratio ($\chi^2/df$) < 2.5

Standardized Factor Loadings

Standardized factor loadings ($lambda$) from CFA models confirm that all four items are potent indicators of the latent customer entitlement construct:

• Item 1 ("earned special treatment"): $lambda pprox .84 – .89$
• Item 2 ("deserve preferential treatment"): $lambda pprox .89 – .94$
• Item 3 ("feel entitled to special consideration"): $lambda pprox .87 – .92$
• Item 4 ("right to expect preferential treatment"): $lambda pprox .81 – .86$

Average Variance Extracted (AVE) values consistently exceed $.75$, far surpassing the established psychometric benchmark of $.50$, verifying convergent adequacy at the latent level.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Customer Special Treatment Entitlement Scale (CSTE)
• Construct Assessed: Customer special treatment entitlement (earned, domain-specific expectation of preferential treatment from a commercial firm)
• Test Type: Self-report psychometric scale
• Number of Items: 4 items
• Authentic Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly Disagree, 7 = Strongly Agree)
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire, online survey platforms (Qualtrics, Decipher, MTurk, Prolific), or embedded within consumer experimental vignettes
• Target Population: Consumers, retail shoppers, loyalty program members, service patrons
• Scoring Protocol: All items are positively keyed (no reverse-scored items). An overall index of customer special treatment entitlement is calculated by computing the arithmetic mean across the four responses (ranging from 1.0 to 7.0), where higher composite scores reflect greater perceived entitlement to preferential treatment.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Customer Special Treatment Entitlement Scale was established and published in 2014 by Rebecca Walker Reczek, Kelly L. Haws, and Christopher A. Summers in the Journal of Consumer Research. The instrument is considered an open academic measurement tool accessible for non-commercial, educational, and scholarly research purposes without royalty fees, provided appropriate scholarly attribution is accorded to the original authors and publisher. Commercial deployments, market research consulting implementations, or integration into proprietary enterprise customer-relationship management software may require permission from the copyright holders (Oxford University Press on behalf of the Journal of Consumer Research, Inc.).

12. References

• Adams, J. S. (1965). Inequity in social exchange. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 267-299). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60108-2
• Campbell, W. K., Bonacci, A. M., Shelton, J., Exline, J. J., & Bushman, B. J. (2004). Psychological entitlement: Interpersonal consequences and validation of a new-scale. Journal of Personality Assessment, 83(1), 29-45. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327752jpa8301_04
• Gouldner, A. W. (1960). The norm of reciprocity: A preliminary statement. American Sociological Review, 25(2), 161-178. https://doi.org/10.2307/2092623
• Kruger, J., Wirtz, D., Van Boven, L., & Altermatt, T. W. (2004). The effort heuristic. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 40(1), 91-98. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-1031(03)00065-9
• Lerner, M. J. (1980). The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion. Plenum Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-3602-0
• Reczek, R. W., Haws, K. L., & Summers, C. A. (2014). Lucky loyalty: The effect of consumer effort on predictions of randomly determined marketing outcomes. Journal of Consumer Research, 41(4), 1065-1078. https://doi.org/10.1086/678052
• Wetzel, H. A., Hammerschmidt, M., & Zablah, A. R. (2014). Gratitude versus entitlement: A dual process model of customer responses to loyalty programs. Journal of Marketing, 78(2), 15-33. https://doi.org/10.1509/jm.12.0167

13. Items of the Scale