Rethinking preemptive consumption: building mechanisms of reciprocity, contextuality, and risk hedging across scenarios
Confronted with fragmentation and retardation in understanding preemption, the authors aim to reassemble the current understanding of preemptive behaviors. Hence, we re-examine multiple mechanisms with three aspects of drive: expectancy, situational, and temporal factors, rooted in consumer psychology and cognition of social crises. Preemptive consumption occurs via three pathways. First, in the explanation of drives, objective-bound motivation, moderated by the opportunism of the outcome, can intensify the intention to behave preemptively, which echoes and extends expectation theory into self-other dual polarity. Second, from the perspective of the behavioral sequence, a defensive or aggressive strategy, tuned by the level of the behavioral barrier, can strengthen the inclination to act preemptively. Finally, an individual's concern about scarcity and the risk of farsightedness, altered by their capacity to handle inequality and threats, impacts preemptive behavior. This study has significant implications for leveraging individual motivations, ethics, and consumer-targeted communication tools.
History
School
- Loughborough University, London
Published in
Journal of Retailing and Consumer ServicesVolume
78Publisher
ElsevierVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© The AuthorsPublisher statement
This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)Acceptance date
2024-02-10Publication date
2024-02-24Copyright date
2024ISSN
0969-6989eISSN
1873-1384Publisher version
Language
- en