Title: Scarcity (social psychology) - Wikipedia
Headings: Scarcity (social psychology)
Scarcity (social psychology)
Contents
Examples
Heuristics
Quantity
Rarity
Time
Restriction and censorship
Studies
Conditional variations
New scarcity
Quantifying value in scarce and competitive situations
Other applications
Competition
See also
References
Bibliography
Further reading

Content: It is particularly common to be biased by the scarcity heuristic when assessing four parameters: quantity, rarity, time, and censorship. Quantity
The simplest manifestation of the scarcity heuristic is the fear of losing access to some resource resulting from the possession of a small or diminishing quantity of the asset. For example, your favorite shirt becomes more valuable when you know you cannot replace it. If you had ten shirts of the same style and color, losing one would likely be less distressful because you have several others to take its place. Cialdini theorizes that it is in our nature to fight against losing freedom, pointing out that we value possessions in low quantities partly because as resources become less available they are more likely not to be available at all at some point in the future. If the option to use that resource disappears entirely, then options decrease and so does our freedom. Cialdini draws his conclusion from psychological reactance theory, which states that whenever free choice is limited or threatened, the need to retain freedom makes us desire the object under threat more than if it was not in danger of being lost. In the context of the scarcity heuristic, this implies that when something threatens our prior access to a resource, we will react against that interference by trying to possess the resource with more vigor than before. Rarity
Objects can increase in value if we feel that they have unique properties, or are exceptionally difficult to replicate.