Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic spread around the world and changed people's shopping habits. This phenomenon causes much fear and induces panic behavior. In a highly uncertain situation, many people are more likely to engage in impulse buying behavior during this period. Our research aims to examine that impulse buying behavior during the pandemic. Hypothesis testing in this study uses the path analysis technique, which is processed using a computer with a program that has been developed by Preacher-Hayes, namely the Macros PROCESS technique. The research finds that panic buying, government stimulus, perceived scarcity, and fear appeal have a significant direct effect on impulse buying behavior. We went a step further to test the indirect effects. The indirect test supports our hypothesis by using fear appeal as mediating variable. The result indicates that fear appeal mediates between panic buying, whereas impulse buying behavior has no significant effect. Furthermore, fear appeal mediates between government stimulus, and scarcity of essential products has a significant effect on impulse buying behavior.

Highlights

  • Based on the background review, we proposed the hypothesis below: H4: Fear appeals mediates the relationship between panic buying and impulsive buying behavior positively

  • We examine the indirect effect of whether the fear appeal can mediate between panic buying, government stimulus, and perceived scarcity

  • This study found that panic buying was dominated by hoarding a lot of essential and non-essential items during COVID-19

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Summary

Introduction

To prevent the spread of COVID-19, individuals have changed the amount of their production to consume daily needs. They have an impact on significant disruption of consumer behavior (Sheth, 2020). This phenomenon causes a lot of individual fear and panic that interferes with buying behavior and shopping habits (Naeem, 2020); Sheth, 2020). Consumers will explore all channels to buy products online and offline in bulk in anticipation of high prices and product scarcity (Chua et al, 2021).

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