http://www.ausfoodnews.com.au/2009/04/08/half-empty-supermarket-shelves-act-like-consumer-magnets.html

Dr. Erica Van Herpen from Wageningen University in the Netherlands concluded, in a study published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, that half-empty supermarket shelves act like ‘consumer magnets’.  Her study, based on experiments involving the sale of wine under controlled conditions, shows that supermarket customers not only choose wine from half-empty shelves more often, but they also think that wine from half-empty shelves is ‘better’. She notes that shoppers “piggyback on the collective knowledge of others. Because among those others are always one or two people who do know which wine is good.”

Van Herpen’s conclusions relate to the ideas of information cascades and the bandwagon effect, which assert that people tend to ‘follow the crowd’ and base their decisions and preferences on the choices of others. In supermarkets, the average consumer is attracted to products that are in demand and more popular. Half-empty shelves imply that many shoppers chose to purchase a particular product and that the product is in high demand, and therefore, consumers rationalize that the product is ‘better’.

Nonetheless, Van Herpen also asserts that this type of consumer behavior is mainly applicable to supermarket products. With retail products, the opposite is true. People would rather purchase items such as clothes, shoes, and cars that not too many other people have purchased because, in general, people are very conscious of creating their own ‘unique identity’. While half-empty supermarket shelves promote consumer purchases, a half-empty rack of tops at a retail store has the opposite effect.