Research in marketing often begins with two assumptions: that consumers are able to choose among desirable products, and that they have sufficient resources to buy them. However, many consumer decision journeys are constrained by a scarcity of products and/or a scarcity of resources. We review research in marketing, psychology, economics and sociology to construct an integrative framework outlining how these different types of scarcity individually and jointly influence consumers at various stages of their decision journeys. We outline avenues for future research and discuss implications for developing consumer-based marketing strategies.

The authors thank the JMR review team for their insightful comments and suggestions. Susan Broniarczyk served as associate editor for this article. MENG ZHU and REBECCA K. RATNER*This research examines how the salience of scarcity influences choices of individual items from a product class. The authors propose that overall perception of scarcity versus overall perception of abundance increases choice share of the most-preferred item from a product class. They argue that this phenomenon occurs because scarcity induces arousal and the heightened arousal polarizes the evaluations of individual items contained in the choice set. The results from five experiments show that scarcity versus abundance broadens the discrepancy between the liking of the favorite and nonfavorite items and leads to a greater choice share of the favorite item. The findings provide support for the arousal-based explanation, showing that the effect of scarcity salience on choices is mediated by consumers' reported arousal level and moderated by an experimentally induced arousal state.

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Everyday decisions present consumers with several trade-offs. In turn, these trade-offs can influence the decision outcome. The authors show that the level at which people construe a choice can affect trade-off making, such that a high construal of a choice decreases comparative trade-offs relative to a low construal. They use six studies to illustrate the idea in three important trade-off-relevant context effects. The results show that a high (versus a low) construal decreases the compromise and background-contrast effects and increases the attraction effect by reducing attribute-level trade-offs.