A Theoretical Investigation Into The Empirical Researches Concerning Financial Scarcity Within The Perspective Of Behavioral Decision

As a strategy to help people to change their social status in modern class society,money plays an important role in people's social life.Since people are born with moral ideas,money also has the dimension of morality.While as the universal equivalent,money can measure all things in modern society,too.Psychological research on money usually use prime as a strategy: the prime of money concept,the prime of financial richness,and the prime of financial scarcity.As the pivotal theme of the research,financial scarcity includes two dimensions: poverty and relative financial scarcity.The two dimensions both exert great impact on people lives,and their impact are similar.Abundant researches indicate that people who are in financial scarcity has very different perception,focus,cognition,preference,decision-making,judgment et.al.Within the area of behavioral decision-making,there are a great deal of achievements,but they usually cannot reach an agreement.To the dimension of rationality and irrationality,on the one hand,people who are in financial scarcity are just like shrewd businessmen in some situations,and their behavior follows the traditional “rational man” economic model and less vulnerable to irrelevant contextual factors.On the other hand,however,these people also have strong irrational consumption tendency,and they prefer to buy expensive and rare goods.To the dimension of self-interest tendency and altruistic tendency,people who are in financial scarcity are typical egoists in some studies,while in another studies,people who are in financial scarcity become altruists.And to the dimension of risk aversion tendency and risk-seeking tendency,people who are in financial scarcity sometimes are typical risk averters,they often have steeper temporal discounting rate and prefer small immediate rewards.While at other times,they also show higher risk-seeking tendency and participate in gambling,take usury,and reluctant to buy health insurance.Although there are a lot of theories like compensation theory and environmental risk theory to explain these phenomena,there are also a lot of difficulties.Based on a good deal of former researches,this essay firstly indicates theconflicting results of these researches,then indicates four theories ——scarcity mindset theory,life history strategy theory,affect heuristic theory,and regulatory focus theory——to explain these conflicts and therefore achieve the goal of promoting empirical study in this area.