Dual-Affect Mechanisms: How Time Scarcity and Quantity Scarcity Elicit Impulse Buying for Probabilistic Products Through Concurrent Mediation of Anticipated Surprise and Regret

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-980-3_3How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Probabilistic Products; Scarcity Tactics; Consumer Anticipation; Impulsive Trait; Impulse Buying Behavior

Abstract

With the rapid expansion of probabilistic products in the consumer market, their unique decision uncertainty and emotionally stimulating properties provide new application scenarios for scarcity marketing strategies. However, existing research has yet to fully clarify the underlying psychological mechanisms through which scarcity tactics influence consumers’ impulse buying behavior, particularly lacking an integrated framework that incorporates the mediating pathways of consumer anticipation and the moderating role of individual traits. This study integrates the Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) framework and Expectancy Theory. Employing structural equation modeling and Bootstrap testing on structured questionnaire data from 509 consumers, we empirically find that: (1) Both time scarcity and quantity scarcity not only directly and positively drive impulse buying behavior, but also indirectly influence consumption decisions through the parallel mediating pathways of anticipated surprise and anticipated regret. (2) Consumers’ impulsive traits exert a differential moderating effect on the emotional pathways: the high-impulsivity group relies primarily on the affective gratification drive of surprise emotions, whereas the low-impulsivity group is significantly dominated by the loss aversion characteristic of regret emotions. Accordingly, this study proposes actionable suggestions for businesses to construct tailored marketing frameworks and provides empirical support for policy-driven sustainable consumption growth.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Anqi Lin
AU  - Xinran Yu
AU  - Geshuo Cao
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/26
TI  - Dual-Affect Mechanisms: How Time Scarcity and Quantity Scarcity Elicit Impulse Buying for Probabilistic Products Through Concurrent Mediation of Anticipated Surprise and Regret
BT  - Proceedings of the 2025 5th International Conference on Business Administration and Data Science (BADS 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 12
EP  - 23
SN  - 2352-538X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-980-3_3
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-980-3_3
ID  - Lin2025
ER  -