Timed intervention in COVID-19 and panic buying

By Catherine Prentice, Jinyan Chen, Bela Stantic. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 2020

207 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In view of 2020 outbreak of the pandemic COVID-19, the paper examines the relationship between government measures for combating the pandemic and their side effects. Panic buying is identified as one such side effect. Among various models and measures undertaken by government to manage the pandemic, timed-intervention policy is commonly practiced by most countries. This paper examines the timing effect between government measures and panic buying. Three studies were undertaken to understand the timing effect and identify a connection between timed measures and consumer behaviours. Semantic analysis, secondary data search, and big data analytics were deployed to address the research aim. Although claiming a causal relationship is cautioned, the findings reveal a connection between timing of government measures and panic buying. These findings are discussed with the support of real-life evidence. Implications for researchers and practitioners conclude this paper.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e198b592cb57f7cd14423e61247c0245a37edd34

Citations in the corpus

• The panic buying behavior of consumers during the COVID-19 pandemic: Examining the influences of uncertainty, perceptions of severity, perceptions of scarcity, and anxiety (2021, unknown): “Therefore, to address this issue and ensure a greater amount of social and economic stability, performing systematic research on panic purchasing behavior is essential (Liren et al., 2012; Prentice et al., 2020).”
• Panic buying research: A systematic literature review and future research agenda (2021, unknown): “Responses such as perceived scarcity (Arafat et al., 2020; Gupta & Gentry, 2019; Prentice et al., 2020; Robinson et al., 2016) and perceived threat (Yuen et al., 2020) are more complex as they are a mix of rational and instinctive responses to an external uncontrolled situation.”
• Managing the effectiveness of e-commerce platforms in a pandemic (2020, unknown): “In this regard, the Covid-19 pandemic has changed consumer purchasing behavior as consumers fear contagion (Laato et al., 2020; Prentice et al., 2020).”
• What Have We Learned about the Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Consumer Behavior? (2021, unknown): “between government measures to combat the pandemic and their side effects, such as triggering panic buying, was examined in [8].”