Book Review: Expert Systems

chologically speaking) with other attributes such as price, status, and quality, among others. An example of a research question is: Under what conditions do consumers make scarcity-quality inferences? One hypothesis is that consumers who are less familiar with the product are more likely to make a scarcity-quality inference than those who are more familiar with it. This type of research has significant implications for product quality strategies; that is, marketers may be advised to create product scarcity so as to induce a scarcity-quality inference. Such an inference would then create or enhance consumers' perceptions of product quality. Product scarcity may play an important role in the involvement paradigm as it is applied to promotion and advertising. As suggested by Brock and his colleagues in the special issue, product scarcity may have a moderating effect on persuasion and heighten consumers' involvement with promotional messages, thus increasing the effectiveness of informational messages. Therefore, marketers may be advised to use high-quality arguments in their promotion of scarce products. In the context of diffusion-of-innovation research, product scarcity also may play a significant role in predicting adoption of innovations. One possible hypothesis is that product scarcity moderates the relationship between product novelty and adoption among innovators. That is, innovators are likely to adopt novel products as opposed to ones that are not novel, especially when the novel products are also perceived as scarce, unique, or unavailable. From a managerial perspective, marketers of technological innovations may promote their products as novel and scarce (unique or unavailable) to accelerate the rate of diffusion among innovators. Marketing researchers who are involved in different programs of research should reexamine the significance of product scarcity in the context of their own paradigms. The incidence of product scarcity in developing countries presents fertile ground for research in this area. Therefore, international marketing researchers and others interested in product scarcity may focus on the international arena to examine this phenomenon in ecologically valid settings. All in all, the special issue on The Psychology of Unavailability sensitized me to the growing importance of the role product scarcity plays in consumer behavior. I think my marketing colleagues will be equally sensitized to the importance of product scarcity after reading this special issue. M. JOSEPH SIRGY Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University