Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (2023) 51:1191–1196
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-023-00984-w
EDITORIAL
The ubiquity of scarcity
Russell W. Belk1 · Gopal Das2 · Shailendra Pratap Jain3
Published online: 28 October 2023
© Academy of Marketing Science 2023
Introduction
To pre-contact Aboriginal Australians, possessions were
unwelcome. When you are nomadic, possessions are a bur-
den. Rather than each member of a group having their own
spear, it makes more sense that someone who wants to hunt
kangaroos on a given day picks up a colleague’s spear with-
out asking and returns it when they are done. But with Euro-
peans came property laws and a gradual displacement of the
sharing ethos (Belk et al., 2000). Still, the European laws
at the time dealt with tangible or “real” property. When it
came to creative art, there was another sort of encounter with
Western property rights, in this case intellectual property.
When Aboriginal Australian art began to become popular
on the world market, it was still common to have an artwork
painted on sand by multiple members of a clan who were
responsible for a clan design (Belk & Groves, 1999). But the
Western art market demanded individual artist signatures as
well as more permanent canvases. This became a bit chal-
lenging. Heraclites declared to Westerners two and a half
millennia earlier that water, air, fire, and human intellect
are a part of a commons available to all (Hyde, 2010, p.15).
Opposing this principle became trickier still when the inter-
net was developed, and free thinkers of the day declared that
“information wants to be free.” Soon collective movements
like Napster and Pirate Bay became hubs on which to freely
share and acquire, recorded music, movies, and software
(Giesler, 2006). Corporate battles ensued and contemporary
sharers were branded as pirates and faced with fines and
imprisonment.
The listed order of authorship is alphabetical. All three editors
contributed equally to this editorial.
* Shailendra Pratap Jain
spjain@uw.edu
1
York University, Toronto, Canada
2
Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, Bengaluru, India
3
University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
Various steps occurred as corporations and the lawmakers
scrambled to catch up with technology, ranging from Digital
Rights Management (DRM) that embedded anti-copying soft-
ware, to criminal prosecution, limited editions, and blockchain
digital registries (Mardon & Belk, 2018). Non-fungible tokens
(NFTs) have even found a way to make freely circulating digital
copies like those widely available on the internet become either
authentic or inauthentic. Some of this was necessary to provide
ways for artists to make a living (Lessig, 2004), but it is clear
that even if information still wants to be free, the business and
legal world will not allow it. They have found ways to artifi-
cially create scarcity in an era when perfect digital copies of
digital goods can be made infinitely available at little or no cost.
A similar story can be told about sharing. Without sharing
it is doubtful that the human species would have survived.
Those who are old enough may remember when hitchhik-
ing, staying with friends while travelling, making copies of
music, film, and TV tapes, and borrowing a cup of sugar from
neighbors (in an era when Westerners used to make pies and
cakes from scratch) were all common practices (Belk, 2010).
But thanks to companies like Zipcar, Didi, Bla Bla Car, Ola,
Uber, Didi, Airbnb, Spotify, Netflix, and Uber Eats, the for-
mer free sharing actions have now been commodified and
monetized. Their pricing has made them scarce (Albinsson
& Perera, 2018; Belk et al., 2019; Sundararajan, 2016).
It is not just internet-based giants that have privatized and
commodified once commonly shared practices. Within the
household of the nuclear family, once-shared possessions like
the family car, TV, stereo, phone, computer, radio, and even a
meal have now been privatized and are separately owned and
used by each member of the household over a certain age.
While it might be argued that this is an effect of abundance
rather than scarcity, the effect in taking these objects out of the
pool of shared household goods is to behave as if they are ours
and ours alone and not to be shared between spouses, siblings,
or other generations under the same roof. In this case, it is our
privatized feelings toward these goods that has made them
scarce private possessions. Not only has the family institution
suffered, so has the general model of pooling and allocation
of scarce, once familial, resources.
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Scarcity is everywhere
At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic we learned that
such sudden shocks to the global economic system made
shortages into seeming or actual scarcities. Masks, sanitiz-
ing solutions, other personal protective equipment (PPE),
and respirators were suddenly in short supply. As stay-at-
home orders took effect, the four walls were closing in on
us making things look a bit shabby. Home furnishings,
DIY home improvement materials, desks, and home office
goods soon became scarce as well. We panicked and began
to hoard goods such as toilet paper and soap. Anything
that we worried might run out was snapped up and this
led to more shortages. Even if there was no actual threat
of a shortage, at least we felt we were doing something.
When COVID restrictions were finally over, new things
began to be scarce: clothing, rental cars, vacation prop-
erties, caravan (travel trailer) rentals, cruises, and more.
“Cabin fever” as much as pent-up demand drove many of
these shortages and the underlying feeling of scarcity. This
in turn made prices for these goods go up as the demand
for plywood and lawn furniture came down. There was
now a glut on the market for face masks and other PPE.
Long-delayed medical procedures had a huge backlog.
Compounded by medical worker burnout and resignations
due to the stress and over-work during COVID, hospital
OR scheduling became another problem of scarcity.
Natural disasters, war, global warming effects, and
political tariffs and embargoes, are other semi-random
factors causing scarcity. So are economic booms, stock
market surges, and mass migrations. Simple supply and
demand explanations are just that—simplistic. The point
is that scarcity is ubiquitous, in both good times and bad.
Shifts in climate and fossil fuel prices increase not only
the demand for electric vehicles, but also rare metals used
for electric batteries, public and private home charging
stations, computer chips, new skills for car mechanics,
and home electricity. And electric vehicles are but one
response to shortages of clean air, water, and land in the
fight against global warming.
We can see here a series of global ripple effects of scar-
cities that drive home the points that we are an intercon-
nected global world, little shortages can have large conse-
quences, and we will always have scarcity and shortages
as well as abundance and over-supply. Price responds
accordingly, but charging a higher price during times of
scarcity doesn’t solve the problem. It merely skews the
distribution of who can afford it. Government intervention
may or may not help. Support for pharmaceutical compa-
nies during COVID helped spur the rapid development
and scaling up of vaccines that saved lives. It also resulted
in windfall profits. These are wicked problems that often
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Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (2023) 51:1191–1196
demand drastic actions. They are also problems that can
lend themselves to corporate profiteering as well as irra-
tional consumer actions like hoarding toilet paper.
Scarcity’s robust and sometimes dramatic presence
in life makes it imperative that we continue to engage
in revealing its antecedents, correlates, and processing,
judgmental, and behavioral consequences. In pursuit of
this goal, we embarked on this special issue and received
several interesting and rich manuscripts. Owing to scarcity
of editorial space, we could accept only nine which we
summarize below. Towards the end of our editorial, we
muse on scarcity as a proxy for some existing well-known
constructs hoping to bring together different streams.
Subsumed in these musings are some ideas that can spur
research in some crucial domains of our existence.
Overview of the articles in this issue
Several authors and reviewers bunched up to create and
craft the nine manuscripts in this special issue represent-
ing a broad swath of topics centered around the theme of
scarcity. These manuscripts somewhat organically organize
themselves into three groups: six that focus on scarcity and
consumers, two that examine the interplay of scarcity and
business, and one that focuses on scarcity and society. Below
we capture a summary of each manuscript grouped under
these three categories:
Scarcity and consumers With a sample of over 60,000
observations from a survey in rural India, two archival
datasets from surveys in Italy and Germany, and two pre-
registered online experiments, Sarial-Abi and colleagues
(2023) show that consumers with scarce financial resources
have greater discretionary expenditures because they harbor
greater optimism about the future leading them to engage
in more discretionary spending, borrowing, and investing.
These results add a new intellectual layer to the literature
on financial scarcity and discretionary consumption while
providing guidelines for managers and public policy makers
to nudge financially strapped consumers towards discretion-
ary consumption. In another multi-method inquiry featuring
data from the lab, field, and archives, Wu and colleagues
(2023) forward the provocative idea of ‘beauty is scarce’ and
the related proposition—that product aesthetics are a scarce
commodity. Using this proposition as the springboard, they
examine the effort consumers are willing to exert in acquir-
ing products with superior aesthetics and find that the desire
for such acquisitions is driven by the pride of owning them.
In addition to documenting an empirically robust phenom-
enon, the paper pioneers the notion of aesthetic scarcity.
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (2023) 51:1191–1196
The well-known dichotomy of time vs. money scarcity
and its implications have been investigated to the extent that
they now form a legitimate scarcity research marker. Across
four experiments, Malika and Maheswaran (2023) use this
dichotomy to examine how service firms that are either time
crunched or money crunched can use these scarcity cues to
influence purchase. Intriguingly, this investigation finds that
firms experiencing time scarcity are judged as competent
while those experiencing money scarcity are perceived as
warm. This difference in perception maps onto preferences
such that consumers who are communal (vs. exchange) ori-
ented prefer to purchase from a time (vs. money) crunched
firm. An interesting implication of this investigation is that
instead of avoiding it, service firms can use their resource
(time or money) scarcity to influence consumer judgments
and behavior.
Henkel and Toporowski (2023) examine the temporal
effects of scarcity using a novel context – pop up stores
which exist for a limited time and are among the first to
offer insights regarding the link between scarcity and self-
enhancement. Two field and three lab studies reveal that
a pop-up store’s temporal scarcity is associated with an
enhanced brand experience. The authors also show that
consumers with a high need for uniqueness communicate
this experience with distant others in a self-enhancing and
positive way but neutrally with close others. The idea of the
self is explored by Nguyen and colleagues (2023) as well.
Integrating disposal and scarcity literatures, these authors
compare the effects of different disposal-based scarcity strat-
egies—incineration which completely destroys the product,
and less destructive methods such as recycling, donating,
or discounting through factory outlets. Their empirical test-
ing finds that scarcity through destruction compromises
consumer brand evaluations while recycling, donating, and
discounting methods, along with indicating a lack of brand
overstock, can enhance brand evaluations. Communicating
sold-out stock does not translate into such beneficial effects.
Several mediators underlie these varied effects of overstock
reduction methods including exclusivity, popularity, and
wastefulness. They also identify self-brand connection to
moderate the mediating effect of perceived wastefulness in
the link between overstock reduction methods and brand
evaluations. In addition to documenting these interesting
effects, this paper serves an important purpose – it brings
together disposal and scarcity, two relatively unexplored
domains in consumer research.
Lastly, in a conceptual piece, Roux and colleagues (2023)
draw upon the 5Ps (Product, Price, Promotion, Place, and
People) of the marketing mix to identify open research ques-
tions about the significance of scarcity for both marketing
strategy and consumer behavior. This manuscript carries
potential to form the basis for multiple future inquiries that
go deeper into the scarcity domain.
1193
Scarcity and business Ishihara and colleagues (2023)
explore a new product introduction scenario in the beer mar-
ket with two distinct features—the product is available for
a limited time and has been introduced under an umbrella
brand. Using a multiple discrete–continuous choice model,
they analyze individual-level transaction data capturing
consumer choice and the asymmetric sales spillover effects
between a parent product and a limited-time subproduct.
Among other interesting results, one of their findings is that
umbrella branding for limited-time products increases the
brand-level demand despite the cannibalization of the sales
of a parent product. The intriguing story here is that a strat-
egy of a limited-time product introduced under an umbrella
brand name may help spur brand-level demand.
In an invited piece for this special issue, Hamilton and
Hosany (2023) propose a framework that distinguishes
between demand-driven vs. supply-driven scarcity and
strategic vs. non-strategic drivers of product scarcity, and
then juxtaposes them. This framework generates a few
crucial insights. First, scarcity’s effects are predicated on
the consumer segments in focus—some segments value
it more, some less. Second, when a product experiences
scarcity from the demand as well as the supply side (ver-
sus one or the other), its value tends to be longer lasting.
Third, how a firm allocates resources to match demand and
supply influences consumer response. Moving forward,
we expect this article to become foundational for scarcity
researchers.
Scarcity and society Hosany and Hamilton (2023), drawing
on depth interviews with 30 families from diverse demo-
graphic backgrounds, develop a framework to demonstrate
how families respond to resource scarcity. This research
examines how multi-dimensional, concurrent and/or con-
secutive life events, such as job changes, house moves, or
childbirth, create a mismatch between available and required
resources to trigger situational resource scarcity. The authors
identify different patterns of adjustments in consumption and
resource investment over time, based on families’ chronic
resources and reliance on support networks. Notably, the
greater flexibility afforded by multiple family members is
constrained by collective goals, domains of control, tensions
and negotiations.
Scarcity: Some further musings
As these nine articles—seven empirical and two concep-
tual—indicate, scarcity is ubiquitous and enmeshed with
the lives of the consumer, the firm, and society at large.
With its tentacles circling the planet, it is timely to ask:
does scarcity relate only to 5Ps, time, and money? Clearly,
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these represent the low hanging fruit of inquiry domains and
unsurprisingly, most foundational research has focused on
these forms of scarcity. However, when we take a high-level
view, it becomes evident that whenever there is a lack or
shortage of ‘something’, it represents scarcity. What could
these ‘somethings’ be? We offer a few ideas to cast some
existing scholarship under the rubric of scarcity as well as
propose some novel areas that research can help illuminate.
Loneliness as relational scarcity Loneliness is believed to
be a scourge invading our planet and is viewed as involv-
ing “…situations in which the number of achieved rela-
tionships is smaller than desired, or when the existing
relationships fail to achieve the desired level of intimacy”
(Jong-Gierveld & Kamphuis, 1985). This classic view
underlies much of the subsequent literature on loneliness.
A key aspect of this definition is that loneliness is intrinsi-
cally linked with situations when consumers lack stable
and net positive relationships. Das et al. (2021) explore a
broad set of COVID-related marketing implications and
propose relational scarcity as one of them. Indeed, lonely
consumers face scarcity of positive relationships. Interest-
ingly, loneliness is associated with some mental health
issues (Gerino et al., 2017) similar to those being discov-
ered with scarcity (Yazd et al., 2020). It will be useful
to delve into typologies associated with both to examine
where loneliness and relational scarcity overlap and where
they do not.
Scarcity of coping resources Consumers experience stress-
ful situations before, during and after consumption and
use different coping strategies to address them. Two such
strategies that are well accepted in literature are problem-
focused and emotion-focused coping (Strutton & Lumpkin,
1994). Coping that is problem focused involves approaching/
squarely facing a stressful situation and acting to minimize/
eliminate it. Emotion-focused coping represents an avoid-
ance strategy and serves more as a regulatory response to
the stress wherein consumers focus on their feelings vis-à-
vis the problem. When consumers are dispositionally more
problem or emotion-focused, they could experience resource
scarcity which prevents them from using the other strategy.
Addictive consumption is a type of behavior which is often
associated with serious negative consequences and for alco-
hol, drugs, smoking, and gambling alone, it costs upwards of
$750 billion in the US (Reimann & Jain, 2021). One of the
underlying drivers of addiction is repetitive and severe child-
hood trauma (Zarse et al., 2019). Such trauma is believed to
affect emotional pathways in the addict’s brain and ‘using’
becomes the mechanism to cope with stressful situations.
This repetitive cycle once started can become difficult to stem
and results in addiction which is notoriously hard to treat. A
reason why addicts may fail in their effort to recover is their
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Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (2023) 51:1191–1196
inability to healthily cope with a stressful situation. Dimin-
ishing/minimizing this scarcity of coping resources and help-
ing addicts develop an abundance of such resources are the
foci of most of rehabilitation and recovery programs. Scarcity
scholars can subsume an examination of coping resources
as their research mission to enable a deeper understanding
of the causes and consequences of addiction and maladap-
tive consumption and interventions that can help in recovery
(Chang et al., 2021).
Scarcity as a disposition Virtually all research treats scarcity
as situational—a product in a limited edition, a promotion
ending on a specific date, consumers being financially or
time crunched. Might some consumers dispositionally sub-
scribe to the belief that the “grass is always greener on the
other side” (Goldsmith et al., 2020)? Regardless of where
the roots of such a mindset reside exploring which should be
a standalone research endeavor, there are likely to be non-
trivial consequences of such a mindset. For instance, some
of the emotional correlates/effects of a scarcity mindset
could be envy and/or jealousy towards others’ possessions,
greed, and low self-esteem.
Conclusion
We would like to thank the authors whose outstanding
research is published in this special issue as well as those
whose work did not find a place here. A number of review-
ers offered their time and intellectual wisdom to help cull
through the manuscripts. One of our pleasant realizations
while working through this special issue was that there
is no scarcity of high-quality scarcity research emerging
from different parts of the world. For this, we are abun-
dantly grateful.
Appendix: List of reviewers for this special
issue
Thank you to the following reviewers who offered their
time and effort to review manuscripts for this special issue.
Sascha Alavi
Joshua T. Beck
Michael Bryan Beverland
Abhijit Biswas
Tonya Williams Bradford
Aaron Brough
Dipankar Chakravarti
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (2023) 51:1191–1196 1195

Patrali Chatterjee Anne Roggeveen

Amitava Chattopadhyay Gretchen R. Ross
Hai Che Caroline Roux
Fangyuan Chen Subroto Roy
Catherine Cole Anthony Salerno
T. Bettina Cornwell Saeed Samiee
Robin A. Coulter Hope Jensen Schau
Carolyn F. Curasi Sankar Sen
Matteo De Angelis Rafay A. Siddiqui
Alain Debenedetti Tandy Thomas
Claudiu Dimofte Gulnur Tumbat
Patrick van Esch Broderick Turner
Ali Faraji-Rad Aulona Ulqinaku
David Gal Giampaolo Viglia
Tanuka Ghoshal Jing (Alice) Wang
Michael David Giebelhausen Yan Xu
Julian Givi Danny Zane
Kelly Goldsmith Wei Zhang
Laura Grazzini Chen Zhou
Adam Eric Greenberg
Rebecca W. Hamilton
Manuel Hermosilla
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