Buy now or regret later: Social media-induced panic buying of medical supplies during COVID-19

  • Received April 23, 2022;
    Accepted September 7, 2022;
    Published October 3, 2022
  • Author(s)
  • DOI
    http://dx.doi.org/10.21511/im.18(3).2022.17
  • Article Info
    Volume 18 2022, Issue #3, pp. 197-206
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

A huge body of research analyzed panic buying during the pandemic; however, there is a dearth of studies scrutinizing social media triggering panic buying of drugs and medical supplies. This study assesses the impact of social media on panic buying of drugs and medical supplies during COVID-19. An online survey was conducted in the Delhi-NCR region (India) using a 5-point Likert scale questionnaire. The data were collected from the respondents (N = 250) who were youngsters considering their pivotal role in the battle against COVID-19. Regression analysis in SPSS was used to process the data. The results manifested a strong impact of social media on buying behavior during COVID-19. Perceived scarcity (p = .000), perceived quality (p = .000), perceived cost (p = .000) of medical supplies, and fear-of-missing-out (p = .000) were found to strongly influence panic buying. Further, perceived scarcity was found to have a significant impact on FOMO (p = .0400). At the same time, perceived cost also had a substantial effect on perceived quality (p = .0100). The results indicated that perceived scarcity did not affect perceived quality (p = .0600). People indulged in hoarding during COVID-19 to remove their fear of missing out. The perception of scarcity of medicines, the quality degradation that may happen later, or the likelihood that costs may increase in the future contributed fairly to people stockpiling. Perceived scarcity also induced fear of missing out, while perception about the quality was dependent on perceived cost.

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    • Table 1. KMO and Bartlett’s test
    • Table 2. Factor loading
    • Table 3. Reliability
    • Table 4. Summary of hypotheses testing
    • Conceptualization
      Huma Parveen, Najat S. M. Habbas, Amgad S.D. Khaled
    • Data curation
      Huma Parveen
    • Formal Analysis
      Huma Parveen, Ahmed Suhail Ajina
    • Methodology
      Huma Parveen, Mamdouh Abdulaziz Saleh Al-Faryan, Amgad S.D. Khaled
    • Project administration
      Huma Parveen, Mamdouh Abdulaziz Saleh Al-Faryan
    • Visualization
      Huma Parveen, Amgad S.D. Khaled
    • Writing – review & editing
      Huma Parveen, Ahmed Suhail Ajina, Mamdouh Abdulaziz Saleh Al-Faryan
    • Investigation
      Ahmed Suhail Ajina, Najat S. M. Habbas, Mamdouh Abdulaziz Saleh Al-Faryan, Amgad S.D. Khaled
    • Software
      Najat S. M. Habbas, Amgad S.D. Khaled
    • Supervision
      Najat S. M. Habbas, Amgad S.D. Khaled
    • Resources
      Mamdouh Abdulaziz Saleh Al-Faryan
    • Validation
      Amgad S.D. Khaled