Journal of the Association for Consumer Research

Research on subsistence marketplaces provides a number of insights about extreme and chronic resource scarcity as well as intangible scarcities in cognitive and affective realms. These insights have been developed from a variety of sources—quantitative and qualitative research, as well as education for communities and for students through a symbiotic academic-social enterprise. These insights are juxtaposed with extant work on scarcity in consumer research, to derive implications for future research and stimulate thinking on a broad variety of scarcities. Our holistic deep dive into extreme scarcity and its multiple dimensions from the perspective of consumer behavior has much to offer in stimulating future research on scarcity.

Cognitive and Affective Scarcities and Relational Abundance: Lessons from the Confluence of Extreme and Chronic Scarcities in Subsistence Marketplaces