How Do I Like My Chances (to Unfold)? Why Perceived Scarcity and Anticipated Hope Lead Consumers to Prefer Increasing Probabilities of Obtaining a Resource

Julian Givi and Christopher Y. Olivola

Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2020, vol. 5, issue 4, 470 - 484

Abstract: The present work examines consumers’ sequence ordering preferences when they have multiple probabilistic opportunities to obtain a resource. In particular, this research investigates whether consumers with multiple opportunities for resource obtainment prefer to start with the opportunity that is least likely to produce the resource and end with the one that is most likely to do so (i.e., an ascending probability sequence), or instead start with the most likely-to-succeed opportunity and end with the least likely-to-succeed one (i.e., a descending probability sequence). Four studies demonstrate that consumers prefer ascending (vs. descending) probability sequences, because they anticipate that this ordering will make the resource feel relatively less scarce, and therefore engender more hope, over the course of the sequence. Contributions to the literatures on scarcity, hope, and sequence ordering preferences, are discussed.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/709907 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/709907 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucp:jacres:doi:10.1086/709907

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the Association for Consumer Research from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().