Rethinking preemptive consumption: Building mechanisms of reciprocity, contextuality, and risk hedging across scenarios

Confronted with fragmentation and retardation in understanding preemption, the authors aim to reassemble the current understanding of preemptive behaviors. Hence, we re-examine multiple mechanisms with three aspects of drive: expectancy, situational, and temporal factors, rooted in consumer psychology and cognition of social crises. Preemptive consumption occurs via three pathways. First, in the explanation of drives, objective-bound motivation, moderated by the opportunism of the outcome, can intensify the intention to behave preemptively, which echoes and extends expectation theory into self-other dual polarity. Second, from the perspective of the behavioral sequence, a defensive or aggressive strategy, tuned by the level of the behavioral barrier, can strengthen the inclination to act preemptively. Finally, an individual's concern about scarcity and the risk of farsightedness, altered by their capacity to handle inequality and threats, impacts preemptive behavior. This study has significant implications for leveraging individual motivations, ethics, and consumer-targeted communication tools.