Cost-of-living crisis and global supply chain disruption make financial scarcity and product scarcity more often and salient than before and significantly influence the most vulnerable customers’ wellbeing.
This project aims to explore innovative policy solutions and develop evidence-based policy advice to tackle the impact of scarcity on grocery customers, especially vulnerable consumer groups.
This project is built upon our Data Scientist Development Project (2023–2024) funded by Consumer Data Research Centre (CDRC), which investigates the effect of cost-of-living crisis and supply chain interruptions on grocery customers, through analysing an extensive dataset containing consumers’ online word of mouth, using advanced text-mining techniques.
This project will collaborate with Leeds City Council to generate the following research impact:
First, we will explore innovative policy solutions and develop evidence-based policy advice to tackle the impact of scarcity, through workshops and seminars with council officers and stakeholders (retailers, charities such as foodbanks, consumers). We will document and publish the advice in a policy brief.
Second, we will introduce to council officers our technical approach of investigating effect of scarcity using text data, and work with council officers to explore further opportunities of applying text-analysis techniques in policy context, through workshops and a co-developed research proposal.
This project is funded by the ESRC Impact Acceleration Account 2024–2025.