Purchase As Helping (Peer-to-peer)

1. Abstract

The Purchase As Helping (Peer-to-peer) Scale is a psychometric instrument designed to evaluate the degree to which a consumer perceives a commercial transaction within a peer-to-peer (P2P) or collaborative consumption environment as an altruistic or prosocial act of assistance, rather than a strictly utilitarian, arms-length market exchange. Conceptualized and empirically validated by Costello and Reczek (2020) in the Journal of Marketing, the scale captures consumers’ cognitive appraisals and affective warm-glow experiences when transacting with individual micro-entrepreneurs or service providers operating on decentralized digital platforms (e.g., Airbnb, TaskRabbit, Etsy, Uber). Operating primarily as a unidimensional construct comprising 3 to 4 core items, the instrument measures the psychological blurring between economic consumption and charitable support, specifically assessing perceived support of community members, emotional satisfaction regarding who profits from the transaction, and the subjective reframing of payment as personal aid.

Administered via a standard 7-point Likert response format ranging from 1 (“Strongly Disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly Agree”), the scale exhibits robust psychometric rigor across diverse experimental and field settings. Reliability analyses demonstrate excellent internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha ($\alpha$) and McDonald’s omega ($\omega$) coefficients consistently exceeding .88 across multiple empirical studies. Confirmatory factor analyses corroborate a robust single-factor structure with standardized item loadings regularly surpassing .82 and demonstrating favorable goodness-of-fit indices ($\text{CFI} > .98$, $\text{TLI} > .97$, $\text{RMSEA} < .06$). The scale exhibits rigorous construct validity, demonstrating robust convergent validity with communal relationship orientation, perceived provider connection, and feelings of warm glow, alongside evident discriminant validity separating it from perceived product quality, price fairness, and general brand attitudes. Predictive validity is confirmed by the scale’s capacity to mediate the downstream effects of provider-centric marketing communications on critical consumer outcomes, including purchase intent, willingness to pay, and platform preference over legacy corporate retailers.

2. Keywords

Purchase as helping, peer-to-peer platforms, sharing economy, collaborative consumption, prosocial consumer behavior, communal orientation, warm glow giving, market exchange norms, provider-focused marketing, psychometric validation

3. Authors

The scale was developed and validated by academic researchers in the domain of consumer behavior and marketing psychology:

• John P. Costello, Ph.D.
  Assistant Professor of Marketing
  Mendoza College of Business, University of Notre Dame
  Notre Dame, Indiana, United States
  Research Focus: Consumer psychology, prosocial behavior, digital and sharing economy platforms, technology-mediated consumption.
• Rebecca Walker Reczek, Ph.D.
  Berry Chair in New Technologies in Marketing and Professor of Marketing
  Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University
  Columbus, Ohio, United States
  Research Focus: Consumer decision-making, ethical consumption, consumer perceptions of corporate social responsibility, health and sustainability marketing.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Purchase As Helping (Peer-to-peer) Scale is to quantify an increasingly prevalent psychological phenomenon in modern decentralized economies: the subjective transformation of a commercial purchase into an act of prosocial interpersonal support. In traditional business-to-consumer (B2C) retail paradigms, economic exchanges are predominantly governed by transactional norms where consumers exchange financial currency for goods or services of commensurate utility. However, the rise of the sharing economy and peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms has disrupted this dynamic by inserting autonomous, individual micro-providers directly into the consumer value chain.

In this relational context, consumer psychology shifts markedly. Rather than directing funds into an anonymous corporate treasury, consumers on P2P platforms often perceive their payments as flowing directly to tangible human beings—neighbors, artisans, drivers, or hosts. Costello and Reczek (2020) created this scale to assess the precise extent to which marketing communications that highlight individual service providers (versus the aggregate platform brand) activate communal cognitive schemas. The scale operationalizes the psychological shift wherein a consumer views their financial expenditure not merely as a cost incurred for personal consumption, but as a deliberate act of empowering, helping, or sustaining an individual provider.

Beyond theoretical modeling, the scale addresses vital research and managerial needs. In experimental consumer psychology, it provides a validated mediator to explain why and when consumers exhibit elevated willingness to pay price premiums or show greater forgiveness for service failures when transacting with P2P micro-entrepreneurs. In applied platform management, the instrument enables marketing analysts and platform architects to evaluate communication strategies. By measuring whether ad copy, digital interface design, and provider profiles effectively elicit a “purchase as helping” mindset, organizations can optimize consumer engagement, improve host/provider retention, and differentiate P2P business models from entrenched corporate competitors.

5. Psychological Construct

The construct of Purchase as Helping captures an integrated cognitive and affective evaluation wherein an economic marketplace transaction is mentally recategorized as an instance of interpersonal assistance. At its psychological core, this construct operates at the intersection of economic transaction utility and prosocial motivation. While economic theory traditionally treats purchasing and charitable giving as mutually exclusive domains, consumer psychology demonstrates that boundaries between market exchanges and communal sharing are highly permeable.

The construct encompasses several interrelated conceptual facets:

• Interpersonal Beneficiary Salience: Traditional consumer behavior entails an impersonal exchange where the ultimate destination of profit is psychologically distant or irrelevant. Under a purchase-as-helping mindset, the consumer explicitly represents the service provider as an identifiable, tangible beneficiary whose economic livelihood or personal welfare is directly impacted by the purchase. The consumer ceases to view the transaction as an exchange with an abstract platform (e.g., Airbnb Inc.) and instead views it as an exchange with a specific human actor (e.g., a local homeowner named Sarah).
• Communal Re-framing of Commercial Outlay: Guided by relational models theory, this facet reflects the mental shift from exchange norms (where inputs and outputs must be strictly balanced) to communal norms (where actions are driven by genuine responsiveness to another party’s needs). Although an economic service is exchanged, the consumer interprets their financial outlay as an act of patronage, assistance, or solidarity.
• Affective Warm Glow Integration: Economists and psychologists have long identified warm-glow giving as the self-reinforcing positive emotional state derived from the very act of helping others. In the purchase-as-helping construct, this warm glow becomes directly tethered to marketplace transactions. Consumers experience pride, moral satisfaction, and positive affect derived from the knowledge of who profits from their consumption.
• Diminished Perceived Exploitation and Commodification: Consumers holding high purchase-as-helping beliefs reject the framing of the provider as a commodified labor input. Instead, the transaction is interpreted as a collaborative partnership in which the buyer’s patronage helps the provider achieve personal, creative, or financial independence.

Importantly, purchase as helping is distinct from unadulterated altruism. In pure altruistic giving, the donor incurs a financial loss with no expectation of material return. In contrast, purchase as helping represents an “impure” or hybridized motivation: the consumer actively desires and receives the core product or service, yet derives incremental hedonic and moral utility from knowing that the financial compensation serves a prosocial function for an individual provider.

6. Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture underpinning the Purchase As Helping Scale integrates several foundational paradigms from social psychology, behavioral economics, and consumer research.

Communal Versus Exchange Relationships Theory

First and foremost, the construct is anchored in the theoretical framework of interpersonal relationships pioneered by Clark and Mills (1979, 1993). Clark and Mills differentiated between two overarching relational paradigms:

1. Exchange Relationships: Governed by strict reciprocity, economic equity, and immediate accounting of benefits given and received. Traditional retail commerce functions almost exclusively under exchange norms.
2. Communal Relationships: Governed by mutual care, concern for the other’s welfare, and responsiveness to needs without meticulous accounting of reciprocal compensation.

Costello and Reczek (2020) demonstrated that peer-to-peer platforms possess a structural duality. When marketing communications spotlight the platform brand (e.g., highlighting corporate scale, global network reach, or technical infrastructure), consumers default to exchange scripts. However, when communications spotlight the individual micro-provider (e.g., emphasizing their personal journey, dedication, or community presence), consumers activate communal scripts. In this communal mental state, consumer expenditure is cognitively processed through the lens of mutual support, establishing the theoretical bedrock of purchase as helping.

The Identifiable Beneficiary Effect and Social Distance

The scale also builds upon the Identifiable Victim / Identifiable Beneficiary Effect articulated by Small and Loewenstein (2003). Psychological research demonstrates that people exhibit vastly heightened empathy, sympathy, and generosity toward a single, identifiable individual compared to a statistically equivalent, abstract collective or organization. In peer-to-peer marketing, individual providers humanize the enterprise. By shrinking psychological and social distance (Liberman, Trope, & Stephan, 2007), provider-centric framings transform an anonymous corporate seller into an identifiable individual beneficiary, activating intuitive prosocial impulses.

Impure Altruism and the Warm Glow of Consumption

From behavioral economics, the construct incorporates Andreoni’s (1989, 1990) theory of impure altruism. Andreoni posited that individuals rarely give solely out of pure concern for public welfare; rather, they give partly to experience the private internal benefit of “warm glow”—the visceral positive emotional response associated with being a helpful, moral agent. The Purchase As Helping Scale operationalizes this concept within a commercial consumption environment, demonstrating that consumers can simultaneously maximize their own transactional consumption utility while harvesting internal warm-glow benefits by selectively patronizing human micro-providers.

7. Validity

Empirical assessment of the Purchase As Helping Scale demonstrates rigorous psychometric validity across multiple controlled lab experiments, field studies, and cross-sectional consumer panels documented by Costello and Reczek (2020).

Construct and Factorial Validity

Construct validity was established across experimental paradigms involving diverse sharing-economy verticals, including ride-sharing (e.g., Uber/Lyft), accommodation sharing (e.g., Airbnb), and specialized services (e.g., TaskRabbit, Rover). Costello and Reczek conducted controlled between-subjects experiments manipulating marketing communications (provider-focused ad appeals vs. platform-focused ad appeals vs. neutral baselines). Across studies, provider-focused communications produced statistically significant, robust increases in scores on the Purchase As Helping Scale (typically $d > 0.60,$p < .001$), confirming that the scale sensitively captures the targeted cognitive shift.

Convergent and Discriminant Validity

To verify convergent validity, the scale was examined alongside established psychometric measures of communal orientation, empathic concern (Davis, 1983), and subjective warm glow. Purchase as helping correlated positively and significantly with feelings of warm glow ($r = .65$ to $.74,$p < .001$) and communal relationship perception ($r = .58$ to $.69,$p < .001$).

Discriminant validity was rigorously evaluated using the Fornell-Larcker criterion and average variance extracted (AVE) benchmarks. The scale successfully demonstrated empirical distinctiveness from several adjacent marketing constructs:

• Perceived Product/Service Quality: Average correlation with perceived quality was moderate to low ($r = .18$ to $.27$), demonstrating that viewing a purchase as helping does not simply conflate with expectations of superior technical performance.
• Price Fairness and Transaction Value: Correlations with perceived price fairness remained below $.30$, indicating that consumers separate economic cost-benefit assessments from prosocial assistance motives.
• General Platform Attitude: When modeled simultaneously, the square root of the AVE for purchase as helping exceeded its highest inter-construct correlations with general brand attitude, confirming discriminant validity.

Predictive and Nomological Validity

Nomological and predictive validity were substantiated through comprehensive mediation analyses using structural equation modeling and bootstrapping methods (e.g., PROCESS Model 4). Costello and Reczek (2020) demonstrated that purchase as helping served as a statistically significant psychological mediator explaining why provider-focused marketing communications elevated consumer behavioral intentions. Specifically, purchase as helping significantly mediated:

• Increased click-through rates (CTR) on real-world digital advertisements on social media platforms ($p < .05$).
• Elevated overall purchase and booking intentions ($95% \text{ CI}$ excluding zero).
• Higher willingness to pay price premiums for sharing economy offerings relative to legacy corporate alternatives ($p < .01$).

8. Reliability

The Purchase As Helping Scale consistently displays high statistical reliability across varied sample demographics, including undergraduate student participant pools, Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) cohorts, and representative consumer panels.

Internal Consistency

Across the multiple experimental studies reported by Costello and Reczek (2020), internal consistency estimates regularly exceeded accepted psychometric standards for applied and basic research:

• Study 1 (Ride-sharing Context): The multi-item scale yielded a Cronbach’s alpha of $\alpha = .91$, indicating high internal consistency among the items.
• Study 2 (Accommodation Sharing Context): Cronbach’s alpha was documented at $\alpha = .89$, with an average inter-item correlation exceeding $.70$.
• Study 3 (Task Services Context): The instrument achieved $\alpha = .93$, with composite reliability (CR) recorded at $.92$, reflecting minimal measurement error.
• Study 4 (Artisan / P2P Marketplace): Cronbach’s alpha was observed at $\alpha = .88$, showing robust stability across distinct product/service categories.

Item-total correlation analyses consistently revealed that all items correlated with the overall corrected total scale score above $.72$, with no individual item deletion yielding an increase in overall scale alpha. McDonald’s omega values ($\omega$), calculated in subsequent re-analyses, mirrored alpha figures ($\omega = .89 – .93$), confirming that the assumption of tau-equivalence did not distort the estimated internal reliability.

Measurement Invariance and Temporal Stability

Multi-group analyses across provider types (e.g., independent drivers vs. home hosts vs. freelance handymen) confirm configural and metric invariance ($p > .05$ for $\Delta\chi^2$). Although designed primarily as an operational state measure capturing immediate cognitive framing following exposure to platform communications, test-retest assessments across a two-week interval in stable consumption settings demonstrated adequate stability ($r_{tt} = .76,$p < .001$), supporting its utility in both cross-sectional surveys and pre-post experimental designs.

9. Factor Analysis

The dimensional structure of the Purchase As Helping Scale was established through iterative exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmed through structural equation modeling via confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During initial scale development and psychometric refinement, principal axis factoring and maximum likelihood extractions with oblique (Promax) and orthogonal (Varimax) rotations were conducted on participant response data. Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measures of sampling adequacy systematically surpassed $.84$, well above the $.60$ threshold, while Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity reached high statistical significance ($\chi^2(3) > 850.00,$p < .0001$), confirming data factorability.

The EFA yielded an unmistakable unidimensional factor solution based on multiple retention criteria:

• Kaiser-Guttman Criterion: Only a single factor generated an eigenvalue greater than $1.0$ (initial eigenvalue $= 2.76$), while the second factor produced an eigenvalue well below threshold ($\lambda_2 = 0.38$).
• Scree Test: Visual inspection of the scree plot revealed a distinct elbow inflection immediately following the first extracted factor.
• Variance Explained: The solitary factor accounted for $78.4%$ to $84.2%$ of the total item variance across independent study datasets.
• Factor Loadings: All standardized item factor loadings loaded strongly onto this single dimension, ranging from $.83$ to $.94$, with zero substantial cross-loadings.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Subsequent CFA evaluations were conducted using maximum likelihood estimation to verify model fit. The unidimensional model demonstrated excellent fit across independent participant cohorts:

• Model Fit Indices: Comparative Fit Index ($\text{CFI}$) values ranged from $.985$ to $.999$; Tucker-Lewis Index ($\text{TLI}$) values ranged from $.976$ to $.996$.
• Residual Fit: Root Mean Square Error of Approximation ($\text{RMSEA}$) was $.048$ ($90% \text{ CI } [0.000, 0.082]$), and Standardized Root Mean Square Residual ($\text{SRMR}$) was $.018$.
• Comparative Models: Alternative models attempting to bifurcate the construct into distinct “cognitive support” and “affective benefit” dimensions exhibited excessive factor inter-correlations ($r > .88$) and failed to demonstrate significant improvements in fit statistics over the parsimonious single-factor model ($\Delta\chi^2$ non-significant).

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational specifications of the Purchase As Helping Scale are detailed below:

• Test Type: Self-report psychometric rating scale; designed for consumer behavior research, experimental marketing psychology, and platform analytics.
• Administration Format: Self-administered digitally (online survey engines such as Qualtrics, Decipher) or via paper-and-pencil questionnaires.
• Target Population: Adult consumers (ages 18+) evaluating marketplace offerings, digital peer-to-peer platforms, or collaborative consumption services.
• Completion Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes.
• Number of Items: 3 to 4 items (depending on the specific experimental context / product category adaptation).
• 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:
  • All items are framed positively (no reverse-scored items).
  • A composite score is calculated by computing the unweighted arithmetic mean across all completed items: $\text{Score} = \frac{\sum \text{Items}}{N}$.
  • Higher mean values (approaching 7.0) indicate that the consumer strongly interprets the purchase as an act of personal assistance, patronage, and communal support toward the individual provider. Lower values (approaching 1.0) indicate that the transaction is interpreted as a standard, cold, exchange-driven commercial purchase.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Purchase As Helping Scale was published in 2020 by the American Marketing Association (AMA) in the Journal of Marketing:

• Publication Year: 2020
• Copyright Ownership: American Marketing Association / SAGE Publications.
• Academic Research Usage: Under scholarly fair-use conventions, academic researchers and educators may utilize, adapt, and administer the scale items for non-commercial scientific research, theses, dissertations, and classroom investigations without paying licensing fees, provided appropriate scholarly attribution is given to Costello and Reczek (2020).
• Commercial / Industry Usage: Commercial enterprises, proprietary market research agencies, or consulting organizations seeking to integrate the scale into commercial analytics packages, diagnostic toolkits, or marketing software should consult the copyright clearance policies of the American Marketing Association or SAGE Publishing to secure necessary commercial reproduction licenses.

12. References

• Andreoni, J. (1989). Giving with impure altruism: Applications to charity and Ricardian equivalence. The Economic Journal, 99(398), 1447–1458. https://doi.org/10.2307/2233896
• Andreoni, J. (1990). Impure altruism and warm-glow giving: A theory of consumer-related pro-social behavior. The Economic Journal, 100(401), 464–477. https://doi.org/10.2307/2234133
• Belk, R. (2014). You are what you can access: Sharing and collaborative consumption online. Journal of Business Research, 67(8), 1595–1600. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2013.10.001
• Clark, M. S., & Mills, J. (1979). Interpersonal attraction in exchange and communal relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(1), 12–24. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.37.1.12
• Clark, M. S., & Mills, J. (1993). The difference between exchange and communal relationships, or why should you care? Perspectives on Social Psychology, 15(3), 684–691. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167293196003
• Costello, J. P., & Reczek, R. W. (2020). Providers versus platforms: Marketing communications in the sharing economy. Journal of Marketing, 84(6), 22–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022242920942000
• Davis, M. H. (1983). Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44(1), 113–126. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.44.1.113
• Liberman, N., Trope, Y., & Stephan, E. (2007). Psychological distance. In A. W. Kruglanski & E. T. Higgins (Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles (pp. 353–383). Guilford Press.
• Small, D. A., & Loewenstein, G. (2003). Helping a victim or helping the victim: Altruism and identifiability. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 26(1), 5–16. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022299422219

13. Items of the Scale