PhronesisPurchasing behaviour occupies a spectrum from deliberate and functional to compulsive and stimulus-driven. In its calibrated form — Calibrated Intentional Acquisition — the person purchases in response to genuine need or deliberate desire, with accurate prediction of post-acquisition pleasure and no compulsive component. Compulsive impulse buying is formally reconceptualised here within the Displacement Framework as a wrong attractor W_ CIB in the landscape of consumer behaviour, structurally distinct from the healthy ground state S^0_ CIA and, critically, from the wrong attractor of retail therapy W_ CRT: retail therapy is emotion-driven, initiated when negative affect breaches a distress threshold; impulse buying is stimulus-driven, initiated when a novel item appears in the environment and triggers an acquisition urge independently of the agent's emotional state.
The distinction is not taxonomic convenience; it implies different mechanisms, different dynamic structures, and different return paths. The impulse-buying architecture turns on the dopaminergic anticipation response: the wanting state produces the peak hedonic signal, which falls sharply upon acquisition and continues to decline through post-acquisition habituation. The purchased item reliably delivers less than the pre-purchase state predicted, not because the item is defective but because wanting-to-acquire and having-acquired are neurobiologically distinct states that the agent systematically conflates.
We term this the Acquisition-Rush Architecture: the rush is in the approach, not the arrival. Three sustaining mechanisms are identified and formally characterised: (1) acquisition-wanting dissociation, in which wanting feels like evidence that having will be good, when the two states are neurobiologically decoupled and wanting is the superior hedonic experience; (2) novelty-habituation acceleration, in which the novelty that made the item salient in the acquisition environment is consumed by the act of purchase itself, leaving only the ordinary object at home; and (3) regret-suppression through next acquisition, in which post-purchase deflation generates mild regret that is suppressed by finding the next item to want, closing the cycle without requiring the agent to experience or process the deflation.
Nine propositions formalise these mechanisms, the dynamics of the post-purchase deflation basin, the formal structure of anticipatory dopamine and post-acquisition hedonic decay, and the return paths through desire-clarification practice, acquisition delay, and deliberate post-purchase attention. The paper draws on Rook's impulse buying research, Baumeister's ego depletion model, Berridge's wanting/liking dissociation, Frederick and Loewenstein's hedonic adaptation framework, Duhigg's habit architecture, and the consumer psychology literature to ground the formal treatment in established empirical findings.