Enhanced Desire for Product Choice in Response to Monetary Scarcity

While consumers are well-accustomed to having the freedom to choose among alternatives, they often find themselves in situations in which their choice freedom is restricted. A theory apt to deal with people’s reactions to threatened freedoms is ‘reactance theory’ (Brehm 1966), which proposes that perceived threats to freedom motivate people to reassert that freedom. Though abundant, reactance research has been limited as it has exclusively focused on how making a specific option unavailable affects consumers’ behavior with respect to that specific object. The current research, however, focuses on a situation that people may experience as a generalized threat to choice freedom, and as such may have a broader effect on consumer behavior. As money is generally seen as giving people options in life and yielding feelings of freedom (Mitchell and Mickel 1999; Vohs and Baumeister 2011), we posit that monetary scarcity may be experienced as a general threat to freedom of choice. Hence, monetary scarcity may be experienced as a restriction of choice, resulting in an increased valuation of option choice. Moreover, as people high (vs. low) in trait reactance are more motivated to reestablish threatened freedoms, monetary scarcity may lead people higher in reactance to value option choice.