Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much Read Online Free PDF Page A

happier—presumably enjoying more of what college had to offer.
    This impact of time scarcity has been observed in many disparate fields. In large-scale marketing experiments, some customers are mailed a coupon with an expiration date, while others are mailed a similar coupon that does not expire. Despite being valid for a longer period of time, the coupons with no expiration date are less likely to be used. Without the scarcity of time, the coupon does not draw focus and may even be forgotten. In another domain, organizational researchers find that salespeople work hardest in the last weeks (or days) of a sales cycle. In one study we ran, we found that data-entry workers worked harder as payday got closer .
    The British journalist Max Hastings, in his book on Churchill, notes, “ An Englishman’s mind works best when it is almost too late.” Everyone who has ever worked on a deadline may feel like an Englishman. Deadlines are effective precisely because they createscarcity and focus the mind. Just as hunger led food to be top of mind for the men in the World War II starvation study, a deadline leads the current task to be top of mind. Whether it is the few minutes left in a meeting or a few weeks left in college, the deadline looms large. We put more time into the task. Distractions are less tempting. You do not linger at lunch when the chapter is due soon, you do not waste time on tangents when the meeting is about to end, and you focus on getting the most out of college just before graduating. When time is short, you get more out of it, be it work or pleasure. We call this the
focus dividend
—the positive outcome of scarcity capturing the mind.
THE FOCUS DIVIDEND
    Scarcity of any kind, not just time, should yield a focus dividend. We see this anecdotally. We are less liberal with the toothpaste as the tube starts to run empty. In a box of expensive chocolates, we savor (and hoard) the last ones. We run around on the last days of a vacation to see every sight. We write more carefully, and to our surprise often better, when we have a tight word limit.
    Working with the psychologist Anuj Shah, we had an insight about how to take advantage of the breadth of these implications to test our theory. If our theory applies to all kinds of scarcity—not just money or time—it should also apply to scarcity produced artificially. Does scarcity created in the lab also produce a focus dividend? The lab allows us to study how people behave under conditions that are more controlled than the world typically allows, revealing mechanisms of thought and action. This follows a long tradition in psychological research of using the lab to study important social issues—conformity, obedience, strategic interaction, helping behavior, and even crime.
    To do this, we created a video game based on Angry Birds for our research. In this variant, which we called Angry Blueberries, players shoot blueberries at waffles using a virtual slingshot, decidinghow far back to pull the sling and at what angle. The blueberries fly across the screen, caroming off objects and “destroying” all the waffles they hit. It is a game of aim, precision, and physics. You must guess the trajectories and estimate how the blueberries will bounce.
    In the study, subjects played twenty rounds, earning points that translated to prizes. In each new round they received another set of blueberries. They could shoot all the blueberries they had or they could bank some for use in future rounds. If they ended the twenty rounds with blueberries saved up, they could play more rounds and continue accumulating points as long as they had blueberries left. In this game, blueberries determined one’s wealth. More blueberries meant more shots, which meant more points and a better prize. The next step was to create blueberry scarcity. We made some subjects blueberry rich (they were given six blueberries per round) and others blueberry poor (given only three per round).
    So how did