The Asymmetry between Time and Money Compensation effect when feeling Scarcity: Time helps the Money Poor, but Money doesn’t help the Time Poor

We examine two important aspects of scarcity. First, we identify a new scarcity effect on consumers’ advice-taking tendency. Second, we show whether the abundance of one resource alters the scarcity effect of another resource in the domain of advice-taking and whether such interplays vary depending on the resource type (e.g. time abundance compensating for money scarcity vs. money abundance compensating for time scarcity). Researchers found that feelings of resource scarcity systematically affect how consumers think, perceive, feel, and behave through scarcity mindsets (Shah et al. 2012; Shah et al. 2015; Roux et al. 2015). Adding to this line of research, we suggest that when feeling time or money scarcity, which are the two common scarcities that people experience, the scarcity mindset affects consumers’ advice-taking tendency. We argue that when people are feeling time or money scarcity, people are less likely to change their pre-existing opinions based on someone else’s advice. Resource scarcity signals that the environment is harsh (Laran and Salerno 2013; S. E. Hill et al., 2012; Griskevicius et al. 2013), such that people need to compete with others for the scarce resource (Kristofferson et al. 2017; Roux et al. 2015). Thus when people are feeling scarcity, the self becomes more important and people act in accordance to one’s own benefit (Roux et al. 2015). Thus, time or money scarcity can make people focus on the self more, thereby leading to lower advice-taking tendency.