Let's think this through. I can give you some pointers, because I've been in the room when these kinds of decisions were made.
Wizards knows how many PHB1 they printed. They know how well they've been selling since release. A quick look at my local B&N shows me how many 4E products they've pumped out in the ensuing time, and they know the sales on each of those products as well. They are operating in what I would call an "information rich" environment.
They also know roughly how many units the buyers at the big chain bookstores are going to take long before the books are printed. The solicitation cycles for the bookstores are longer than the production cycles which means Wizards often has the luxury of "printing to order". When I left the company, book store sales were about 50% of the total volume. Since there's been about a 50% dieoff in hobby gaming retailers since then I assume that the ratio is now closer to 75%. The book chain buyers have very good data warehouses and are able to inspect sales on a title by title, store by store basis. While they don't always do as much research as they could, they often do enough to get pretty close to the expected run rate for a given title. They too are "information rich".
What does this tell us about scarcity for PHB2? It tells us that 4E in general is selling poorly. It tells us that given the insider information, the publisher and the market-maker both had less confidence in this signature product than necessary to meet demand. That's a scary, scary mistake to be making at this stage in the game. The driver behind this is overstock. Neither the sales team at Wizards, nor the buying team at the chain bookstores, wants any overstock inventory. If the book does not become evergreen, the overstock will have to be liquidated and due to the way cost accoutning works, the "charge" for that liquidation will come in some time period other than the period where the profits were made. For a host of accountancy reasons, that can be a budget - and comission - killer.
The natural reaction of a sales team in a declining, underperforming market is to undershoot the demand curve - to genreate artificial scarcity. They'll sell all the books that get produced and lock in their gains, and if some customers don't get the product, well, that's not too harmful in the scheme of things. (Well, it's not too harmful unless your underprinting chokes what might have been a resurgence in demand leading to a recovery in the business, but that's a bird in the bush scenario and these are scarying times for publishers and retailers alike!)
Or maybe it's just a fluke, and there's inventory sitting in stores in one area of the country unsold while books in other areas are flying off shelves as fast as they can be stocked. Or maybe there's another wave of books coming, because the production run had to be split into two for logistical reasons. Or maybe there's an astroturfing campaign underway to simulate consumer demand that doesn't really exist, etc. etc. etc.
By my money is on "internal decision maker doesn't believe in the product" as the reason you're seeing scarcity.
RyanD
