Mullainathan & Shafir 2013 (Scarcity) — tunneling + bandwidth tax; scarcity consumes cognitive resources for executive function

Claim: Mullainathan and Shafir's 2013 Scarcity, drawing on field and laboratory experiments, establishes two operative claims:

• Tunneling. Scarcity focuses cognition narrowly on the scarce resource — a "focus dividend" in the short run, with neglect of peripheral concerns and longer-term consequences.
• Bandwidth tax. Scarcity consumes the cognitive resources otherwise available to executive function, working memory, and impulse control.

Source: Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2013). Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. Times Books.

Confidence: Verified for general population; directional for GC owners (no published bandwidth-tax study specifically on construction owner-operators).

For Candid: For a GC two weeks out from a payroll run, with a slow-paying owner and a sub demanding payment, the bandwidth available to evaluate a strategic 12-month marketing engagement is empirically depleted. This is not a defect of the buyer; it is the predictable cognitive state of someone managing acute resource scarcity.

Operational consequences:

• Long, complex proposals fail. Short, scannable ones land. (Not a stylistic preference — a literal bandwidth constraint.)
• Cold outreach during cash-tight cycle weeks gets disproportionate "no thanks" responses that have nothing to do with the pitch quality.
• Payment terms aligned with the GC's own draw cycle ([[rule-payment-terms-aligned-with-gc-draw-cycle]]) reduce scarcity-cognitive friction without changing total revenue.

Empirical anchor: [[mani-et-al-2013-sugarcane-farmers-cognitive-test]].