A Poor Man Is A Suspicious Man?Effects Of Scarcity On Products With Handwritten Typefaces

People often feel that they have insufficient resources.Poor people lack money and busy people lack time.These common scenarios can make individuals recognize the limitation of their resources,and then activate the perception of scarcity.Even in modern societies where material resources are already extremely abundant,people often feel scarce at certain times.Previous researches have showed that scarcity perception occupies people’s cognitive resources,and then has a negative impact on people’s mental health and behaviors.In the field of consumer research,it has been found that scarcity perception affects consumers’ preferences.This paper focuses on how scarcity perception affects consumers’ preferences for products with different typefaces.This research shows that because consumers high(vs.low)in scarcity consider other people as less trustworthy,they evaluate products with handwritten typefaces,which indicate human presence,less favorably.As a result,consumers who are in the scarcity condition prefer products with machine-written typefaces over those with handwritten typefaces,but this effect does not occur in the control condition.In this paper,a pilot study using secondary data and four experiments are conducted to examine the above hypotheses.In the pilot study,we reanalyzed data from the World Value Survey and found that subjective financial scarcity was negatively correlated with trust in others.In study 1,we manipulated participants’ perception of scarcity by an episodic recall task,and found that scarcity reduced participants’ evaluation of products with handwritten typefaces.From a different perspective,machine-written typefaces led to higher product evaluation than handwritten typefaces in the scarcity condition,but not in the control condition.In study 2,we measured participants’,perceived scarcity and tested the mediating effect of trust in humans.Results showed that scarcity resulted in low trust in humans,which decreased the favorability toward product with handwritten typefaces.However,the mediating effect did not exist regarding products with machine-written typefaces.In study 3,we focused on the scarcity conditions and found that providing quality guarantee increased evaluation of products with handwritten typefaces.However,quality guarantee did not affect evaluation of products with machine-written typefaces.These results confirm the important role of trust in evaluating products with handwritten typefaces.In Study 4,we explored the boundary condition.We found that the negative effect of scarcity on product with handwritten typefaces only existed when the product was used for individual consumption,but not when the product was used for multi-person sharing consumption.This paper not only explores the theoretical relationship among scarcity,trust,typefaces,and product evaluation for the first time,but also helps marketers approach success in the commercial practices.