IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/jconrs/v46y2020i6p1110-1124..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Impact of Resource Scarcity on Price-Quality Judgments
[Hunger Games: Fluctuations in Blood Glucose Levels Influence Support for Social Welfare]

Author

Listed:
  • Hanyong Park
  • Ashok K Lalwani
  • David H Silvera

Abstract

Consumers routinely encounter situations in which they perceive that resources are scarce. However, little is known about how this perception influences consumers’ use of price in their purchase decisions. The present research seeks to fill this gap by examining the link between scarcity and the tendency to use price to judge product quality, and the mechanisms underlying that link. Six studies (and five more reported in the web appendix) using multiple product categories and a variety of operationalizations of both scarcity and price-quality judgments show that scarcity decreases consumers’ tendency to use price to judge product quality. This occurs because scarcity induces a desire to compensate for the shortage and seek abundance, and thereby reduces an individual’s general categorization tendency (because categorizing brings about a feeling of reduction); this, in turn, hinders consumers from viewing products as belonging to different price-tier groups, and thus lowers their tendency to use price as a basis for judging product quality. Boundary conditions for the proposed effect are also identified. The current research makes fundamental contributions to the literatures on scarcity, price-quality judgments, and categorization.

Suggested Citation

  • Hanyong Park & Ashok K Lalwani & David H Silvera, 2020. "The Impact of Resource Scarcity on Price-Quality Judgments [Hunger Games: Fluctuations in Blood Glucose Levels Influence Support for Social Welfare]," Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research Inc., vol. 46(6), pages 1110-1124.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:jconrs:v:46:y:2020:i:6:p:1110-1124.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jcr/ucz031
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Chung, Myungjin & Saini, Ritesh, 2022. "Consumer self-uncertainty increases price dependency," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 140(C), pages 40-48.
    2. Katyal, Kanupriya & Dawra, Jagrook & Soni, Nitin, 2022. "The posh, the paradoxical and the phony: Are there individual differences between consumers of luxury, masstige and counterfeit brands?," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 152(C), pages 191-204.
    3. Gupta, Shipra & Coskun, Merve, 2021. "The influence of human crowding and store messiness on consumer purchase intention– the role of contamination and scarcity perceptions," Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Elsevier, vol. 61(C).
    4. Ryoo, Yuhosua & Kim, WooJin, 2023. "Price-ethicality association: When price discounts inhibit ethical purchasing," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 169(C).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:jconrs:v:46:y:2020:i:6:p:1110-1124.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/jcr .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.