Self-control as a mediator of age on students' compulsive buying.

Prior research on compulsive buying addresses a negative association with dispositional self-control and a decreasing effect of age. However, there is currently no sufficient explanation for the observation that older individuals show a reduced risk for compulsive buying patterns. Our empirical contribution is to test the assumption of a reducing effect of dispositional self-control on compulsive buying in a cross-cultural sample of Chinese (n = 268) and German (n = 247) college students with the Short Form of the Self-Control Scale and the Compulsive Buying Scale. We observed that females show a higher proneness to compulsive buying and older participants show decreased compulsive buying. Mediation analysis reveals that age has a reducing effect on compulsive buying that is fully mediated by dispositional self-control. According to the last observation, our study delivers an explanation of the reduced compulsive buying proneness of older individuals. We discuss limitations and alternative explanations of our study.