Abstract
Over the past decade, several studies have been conducted on the topic of scarcity and its impact on behavior and decision-making. The expansion of interdisciplinary studies of economics and psychology with the advancement of the tools and methods of behavioral and cognitive experiments, especially in the field of brain research, has led to interesting information in this area. Researchers have used the scarcity literature to study and better understand the behavior of consumers, workers, farmers, shoppers, villagers, retailers, etc. in various situations when they experience scarcity of time, food, money, income, liquidity, and so on.
Financial and income fluctuations such as bankruptcy, loss of agricultural products due to natural disasters, high inflation, financial pressure due to large expenses such as buying a house, marriage, and illness, and periods of unemployment due to changing jobs or economic recession, all of these cases which can influence people's perception of resource scarcity. Investigating whether people in such conditions are more prone to make non-optimal decisions is one of the results that studies in the field of decision-making in scarcity can lead to. Since poverty is defined as financial scarcity in its chronic and acute forms, several studies have been conducted with the aim of investigating the behaviors of the poor using the literature on scarcity.
According to the survey conducted by the researchers among the charity's clients in Mashhad, lack of effort to get out of adversity situations, use of employment loans for consumption expenses, marriage of children at a young age, unwillingness to study and skill training, employment in low-income activities Without insurance, despite the offer of better jobs and multiple addictions were ineffective behaviors of clients.
Although the scarcity in the real world can be different from the laboratory conditions in terms of intensity and duration, but studying in a laboratory experiment is always a prerequisite for the accurate and appropriate design of Community-based and field interventions in each area. The cognitive approach to the problem of scarcity and the non-optimal behavior of people in the conditions of scarcity is a new explanation for the phenomenon of persistence of poverty, which complicates the analysis of this phenomenon and policies to reduce it.
In spite of the fact that significant studies have been conducted in recent years about people's behavior in scarcity conditions with laboratory methods, the way financial scarcity affects economic preferences and cognitive mechanisms that mediate the effect still requires field and laboratory studies and designing creative experiments to explain some contradictory effects is (Brijan and Antonides, 2021). Therefore, in the current research, the focus is on measuring the effect of scarcity on working memory and inhibitory control to better understand the relationship between a scarcity and decision-making. In this study, the effect of scarcity due to cognitive load on time and risk preferences is investigated, since risk preferences and time preferences have been mentioned as important functions in shaping decisions (Glimcher, 2015, 260). It has been noted to check whether cognitive load leads to changes in economic preferences in scarcity conditions, two factors of working memory and inhibitory control, which are executive functions and mental bandwidth components, will be evaluated.