Analysis Of Factors Influencing Individual Decision-Making About Panic Buying In Public Crisis

At present, using scientific methods to control public crisis itself is not the only problem facing the crisis managers, to eliminate the resulting social panic and curb the occurrence of irrational herd behavior also becomes the subject of crisis management. Panic buying in public crisis is a typical irrational herd behavior, which often occurs to bring great social impact. Whether the treatment for the behavior is quick, proper directly is related to the government's image and credibility, and also related to the national's economic development and social stability.The public need to response to crisis in emergency, and the exploring of it's decision-making rules in public crisis has been the research focus in recent years. Previous researches focused mainly on two aspects: on the one hand it focused on a brief description of the phenomenon of panic buying; on the other hand it focused on the use of economics or social psychology theory to explain the mechanism of panic buying. Although there has been some research basis, but overall the number of studies is still less, the level is still shallow, and most of them are of simple theoretical analysis, lack of empirical research. The research on influence factors of panic buying have been mentioned by individual scholars, but also limited to theoretical analysis.The stress response theory, Maslow need theory, and theory related psychology and behavioral deviation are firstly used to analyze the root causes of the individual's participation in panic buying in public crisis in this paper. Then individual behavioral characteristics are summarized according to actual cases. Based on the idea of prospect theory and related applications, a psychological expected value model of decision-making about individual's panic buying is built. According to the related study, the factors influence individual's decision-making about panic buying are divided into the individual's characteristics of subjective response to the environment and objective features. Through survey data and the use of binary Logistic regression method, we studies the differences of individuals'decision-making about panic buying with different characteristics. The results indicate that: perception of crisis fears, trust in the government, media pressure, defensive attitude for a possible source of crisis, noise trust attitude, gender and age affect the individual's decision-making about panic buying significantly. Specifically, individuals of more fear of crisis, the less confidence in the government, the greater pressure created by media reports, the stronger defensive instinct on possible sources of crisis, the more easy to believe the noise are easier to take part in panic buying. Women are more likely than men to be get involved in panic buying, and as ages increase, the probability of individuals to take part in panic buying decreases. But the demands of government's public information, the annual income level, occupation do not significantly affect the individuals'decision-making. With the combination of sociology, psychology and the value model of psychological expectations made above, we analyzes the Influence mechanism of significant factors, and also makes speculation for the results of insignificant factors. Finally, this paper puts some coping strategies for panic buying behavior in public crisis.