The Scarcity Bias

Luigi Mittone and Lucia Savadori ()

No 505, CEEL Working Papers from Cognitive and Experimental Economics Laboratory, Department of Economics, University of Trento, Italia

Abstract: The bias generated by the subjective perception of scarcity on the consumer's choice is investigated using two separated experiments. The first experiment is aimed to define the prevailing preferences towards a set of commodities, the second experiment checked the effects produced by the perception that a given good is "scarce". The results shown a preference reversal phenomenon when scarcity is introduced in the experimental design. The results are coherent with a previous experiment (Mittone, Savadori, Rumiati, 2005) based on a developmental explanation of the basic scarcity bias and carried on a sample of children as participants.

Keywords: Scarcity; Decision-making; Economic behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo and nep-exp
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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