Hoarding

Humans are not natural hoarders in the same way. However, hoarding does occur in humans, as a common response to fear, whether fear of imminent society-wide danger or simple fear of a shortage of some good. When trouble looms (such as civil unrest or natural disaster), people's first instinct is to collect foodstuffs, water, gasoline and other essentials which they believe, rightly or wrongly, will soon be in short supply. (They also hoard money, especially if they expect deflation, in which falling prices mean that the purchasing power of money will rise.) This behaviour can often cause the very shortage which has been feared, and governments sometimes choose to introduce rationing in order to combat hoarding. However, those who have successfully hoarded the desired goods will not have to worry about the shortage, whether it was their fault or not. The compulsive collecting of objects is known as pathological or compulsive hoarding.

With the advent of personal computers people started hoarding digital data. In 1980s they started storing megabytes of interesting texts, images and software on floppy disks. Two decades later, computer users hoard on their hard disks gigabytes of songs, movies, software and, of course, pornography. Even though most of the content is not unique and can be easily downloaded from the Internet, many people enjoy creating large personal collections. Now, the data is slowly migrating to portable devices. For example, a 2004 UK study by Toshiba found 60% of the owners of portable devices store between 1000 and 2000 music files on them, the equivalent of 100 music CDs [1].

On a larger scale hoarding can be a business strategy similar to monopolisation, where an individual or organization attempts to temporarily control all available supplies of a given good in order to artificially increase the price. This strategy is also known as "cornering the market".