What is it about?
Everyone at some point in their life experiences scarcity. And for most people, resource scarcity is a common experience, whether it be money, time, food, or products. Money feels tight after paying your bills, there never seems to be enough time in the day, the fridge never feels full, and stores sell out of desirable products especially during the holidays. This research integrates all these different types of resource scarcity into a single framework, and shows that we can predict how consumers--and people in general--deal with resource scarcity.
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Why is it important?
There has been a growth of empirical research on resource scarcity in the last decade, especially in how the experience of resource scarcity affects a person's psychology. However, the work seemed disconnected from each other, and there was not an overarching framework to place all this research together. So, this review paper satisfies this goal by integrating different types of resource scarcity from economics, psychology, marketing, sociology, and biology into a parsimonious model.
Perspectives
This project was a fun endeavor as someone who has never written a comprehensive review paper before. It felt like solving a puzzle by trying to take a step back and see how we can reconcile different findings across many fields--that sometimes had seemingly contradictory findings. I hope when you read this paper, you can see how you deal with resource scarcity in your own life, and how your behavior fits within our framework.
Christopher Cannon
Northwestern University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A Self-Regulatory Model of Resource Scarcity, Journal of Consumer Psychology, February 2018, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1002/jcpy.1035.
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