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Buying can be defined as a process in which money is exchanged for service. Money is in the process most commonly exchanged for food, clothing, transport, entertainment etc. This primary function of buying is in modern societies broadened and subtly changed so that buying takes over some new functions which may overshadow this primary one. Among these new functions rank high a tendency to regulate by the process of buying both positive (relaxation) and negative emotions (compulsion, compulsive buying). At the same time, buying may serve the function of achieving prestige due to the commodities and services bought. In the technical literature, all of these new functions are theorized to relate separately to self-esteem. One can therefore ask what is the relationship of self-esteem to these three new functions of buying. It is the question we tried to answer in our research. It was a study in which we tried to analyze at the same time the relationships of the tree new goals of buying among themselves and between each of them and self-esteem. At the same time, we put to the test three hypotheses according to which the striving to achieve each one of these goals of buying will be motivated predominantly by low self-esteem. In the study there took part 251 respondents in the age range from 14 to 67 years from a general population. The respondents answered two questionnaires, the Rosenberg's Self-Esteem Scale (RSES) and Kreklová's Scale of Reasons to Buy. This second scale aims to measure the three abovementioned reasons to buy. To analyze the psychometric characteristics of both questionnaires we used PCA (Principal Component Analysis). The results of the analyses of RSES show that the scale consists of two dimensions which we named positive and negative self-esteem dimensions. The results of the analysis of the Scale of Reasons to Buy revealed that the scale consists of the three dimensions postulated, e. g. relaxation, compulsion and prestige. To analyze the relationships among the variables we used correlation/regression analyses. Results of these analyses show that the three dimensions of the Scale of Reasons to Buy correlate highly with one another and that at the same time each of them relates differently to the two separate dimensions of self-esteem. To summarize: The dimension of relaxation was not in a significant relationship with either the positive or negative dimension of selfesteem. The dimension of compulsion correlated rather highly with both dimensions of self-esteem, but when put in a regression analyzes in which the shared variances of the other two reasons to buy were controlled these relationships have got close to zero and became nonsignificant. The dimension of prestige has shown the predicted strong relationship with the negative dimension of self-esteem. Its relation to the positive dimension of self-esteem was not significant. The results are in accord with the theories one can encounter in literature. According to these theories in the modern consumer society the processes of buying has got some new functions and at the same time assumed on some functions which were in former societies associated with different activities. Among the new functions pertain the regulation of positive and negative emotions by the process of buying, and striving to achieve status and prestige by the results of it (e.g. commodities and services bought). All of these functions are in the literature hypothesized to relate to self-esteem. The results of our study show that these expectations may be partly wrong: when controlling for the shared variances of predictors, the self-esteem scale relate substantially and significantly only with one dimension or reason for buying, namely with prestige. Those persons who have low self-esteem are probably predisposed to try to heighten their self-esteem by means of the commodities and services bought. The relationships of self-esteem to the other two dimensions of buying may be spurious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]