You’ve probably seen them in malls or online: small sealed packages, often featuring popular cartoon characters, where you don’t know exactly which figurine you’ll get until you open it. These “blind boxes” have grown into a multibillion-dollar business, especially in China, where the market is projected to top RMB 58 billion by 2025. A big reason for that growth is a feeling many shoppers know well: the sense that if you don’t buy now, you’ll miss out.
But scarcity comes in different flavors. There’s the scarcity a company creates on purpose, like a “hidden edition” with a one percent chance of appearing. And there’s the scarcity that seems to bubble up from other shoppers, like a style that “sells out in three minutes” or generates thousands of excited posts online. A new study asks a simple question: do these two kinds of scarcity push people to buy on impulse in the same way, or does one work better than the other?
The question behind the purchase
The research, published in the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, comes from Xiaoli Tang and Yi Zhang of the School of Economics and Management at Yanshan University in China. They focused on a distinction that marketing researchers call supply scarcity versus demand scarcity.
Supply scarcity is the kind a seller controls directly. The company simply decides to make only so many of an item, then tells you so. Think of a luxury carmaker that limits production to keep its image exclusive. Demand scarcity is different. It comes from the crowd, the sense that everyone else wants the item too, that it’s flying off shelves because of genuine popularity. The authors note that in real blind box marketing, both often appear at once, but they wanted to separate the two and compare their effects.
To explain why the two might differ, the researchers leaned on three ideas from psychology and marketing. The first, commodity theory, holds that the harder something is to get, the more we tend to value it. The second is a mouthful called accessibility-diagnosticity theory, which is really about how we judge information. “Accessibility” means how easily you can find or recall a piece of information. “Diagnosticity” means how useful and trustworthy that information is for making a decision. The third, regulatory focus theory, divides people into two motivational styles, which we’ll get to shortly.
Three experiments with simulated shoppers
Tang and Zhang ran three online experiments using a Chinese survey platform, recruiting participants who had bought blind boxes before. In each study, people read a scenario and imagined themselves shopping, then answered questions on a seven-point scale measuring how much they agreed with statements about wanting to buy impulsively.
The first study, with 135 valid responses, set up the basic comparison. One group saw a blind box promoted as a “limited release, first come first served” (supply scarcity). The other saw a box advertised as a “hot rush purchase” with “a large number of people queuing” (demand scarcity). The supply scarcity group reported a stronger urge to buy, with an average impulse score of 5.7 compared to 4.7 for the demand scarcity group. In other words, “we made only a few of these” appeared to motivate buyers more than “everyone is grabbing these.”
The second study, with 148 valid responses, used a clothing blind box and dug into why. Here the researchers measured how accessible and trustworthy participants found the scarcity information. The results suggested that supply scarcity worked largely because of how its information is processed. When a seller officially states a limited quantity, that information is easy to find and easy to believe, so it slides smoothly into a shopper’s decision-making. The analysis indicated that this perception of accessible, credible information fully accounted for the link between supply scarcity and the urge to buy. Put differently, supply scarcity didn’t seem to drive impulse buying directly. Instead, it drove the sense that the scarcity claim was real and easy to verify, and that sense, in turn, drove the impulse to buy.
Demand scarcity had a weaker effect, and the authors interpret this through the same lens. Claims that a product is “selling out” often travel through social media posts from other users rather than official channels. That makes them harder to verify. Shoppers may wonder whether the frenzy is genuine or just marketing hype, and that doubt tends to dampen the effect.
It depends on who’s shopping
The third study, the largest with 473 valid responses, added a twist about personality. This is where regulatory focus comes in. The theory describes two ways people pursue goals. Those with a “promotion focus” are oriented toward gains, achievement, and growth. They chase the ideal version of themselves and respond to signals about uniqueness and winning. Those with a “prevention focus” are oriented toward safety and avoiding loss. They’re more alert to the risk of missing out or making a mistake.
The study found that the best kind of scarcity depends on which mindset a shopper has. For promotion-focused people, supply scarcity worked best. A limited edition fits their desire to collect something exclusive and feel a sense of accomplishment, with an average impulse score of 5.3 for supply scarcity versus 4.0 for demand scarcity. For prevention-focused people, the pattern flipped. Demand scarcity, with its hint that they might lose out if they hesitate, was more motivating, scoring 5.4 versus 4.3 for supply scarcity.
The researchers describe this as a matching effect. When the type of scarcity lines up with a person’s underlying motivation, the pull to buy gets stronger. A collector seeking the thrill of a rare find responds to “only 1,000 made.” A cautious shopper who hates missing out responds to “almost gone.”
What it might mean for marketing, and a few caveats
For blind box companies, the authors suggest tailoring the message. They recommend communicating supply scarcity through official channels, like a brand’s own website, where limited quantities can be stated clearly and backed up. For demand scarcity, they suggest using third-party voices such as reviewers and unboxing videos to make popularity feel verifiable rather than manufactured. They also propose matching messages to audiences, emphasizing exclusivity and collection rewards for promotion-focused shoppers and countdowns or “almost sold out” alerts for prevention-focused ones.
The authors also raise an ethical point. They argue companies should avoid faking scarcity, such as labeling mass-produced items as “limited” or staging false sellout-and-restock cycles to repeatedly trigger impulse buys. They suggest setting purchase limits so scarce items remain fairly available.
Several limits are worth keeping in mind. The experiments relied on imagined scenarios rather than real spending, so actual behavior at checkout could differ. The participants skewed young, matching the core blind box audience but offering little insight into older or non-Chinese shoppers. The authors note that cultural background may shape how people read scarcity cues, with more group-oriented cultures perhaps responding more strongly to the crowd-driven kind. They suggest future work could track real purchases and broaden the range of shoppers studied.
