Scarcity in today´s consumer markets: scoping the research landscape by author keywords

Abstract

Scarcity refers to not having enough of what one needs. This phenomenon has shaped individuals´ life since ancient times, nowadays ranging from daily-life scarcity cues in shopping scenarios to the planet’s resources scarcity to meet the world´s consumer demand. Because of this ubiquity of scarcity, the topic has been attracting attention from scholars and practitioners in different areas. Studies regarding scarcity were conducted across disciplines, based on different assumptions, and focused on distinct study subjects. A lack of mainstream about this topic hindered the convergence of core ideas among different schools of thought. In this article, we take an integrative socio-economic perspective to join diverse findings on scarcity affecting consumer markets, identify topic-specific research questions still to be answered, and provide suggestions for future and integrative research opportunities. A systematic review based on author keywords from 855 publications analyzing scarcity affecting business-consumer interactions serves as a database. Exploratory factor analyses based on author keywords identify shared patterns within and linkages across discourses stemming from various disciplines and theories. Results differentiate distinct research foci in the consumer behavior, socio-political, and other disciplinary research realms. A mapping of these research themes identifies the scarcity-related interplay among consumers, producers, and other stakeholders. Findings point out research directions for future studies at both the research realm level and the interdisciplinary level.

Food and social media: a research stream analysis

“…Yan et al ( 2015 ) analyzed the intellectual structure of the field of the Internet of Things by means of factor and cluster analysis of keywords. Gan and Wang ( 2015 ) used factor analysis to map the intellectual structure of social media research in china by using keywords, and Sun and Teichert ( 2022 ) used factor analysis to study the research landscape of ‘scarcity’ by using author keywords.…”

“…By performing factor analysis, determined keywords are assigned to determined factors based on their factor loadings. Factor loads (FL) inform about the representativeness of a determined keyword for a determined factor, and the usage of a keyword in a research stream (Kuntner and Teichert 2016 ; Sun and Teichert 2022 ). That means that the keywords assigned to one factor are more likely to co-occur than the keywords of other factors.…”

Ocean-human relations in the Anthropocene: mapping trends in sustainability-related marine social sciences articles

“…By grouping the keywords, based on the co-occurrence frequency, into factors, factor analysis identifies keywords that represent a shared research stream (Kuntner and Teichert, 2016). The factor loadings display the representativeness of keywords for a research stream (Wörfel, 2021;Sun and Teichert, 2022). We used a principal component analysis and a Varimax rotation with Kaiser normalization to extract the research streams.…”