How does Resource Shortage work?

[Sneakimus]

I've got 98 People resources, but the game says I have a resource shortage of people and given me a 36 penalty on my profit factor. How does that work?

Image of the issue [imgur.com]

[snowcat]

On the contrary, there are even cases where huge increases in the profit factor occur due to 'people's shortage'.

Personally, I think it is better to file a bug report without thinking too deeply.

[Ash]

It's buggy. Normally, if you're short of, say, 10 people on the Vheabos, game should subtract 10 from your Profit Factor and that's it.
But the way game is now, it looks like either this shortage or PF subtraction (maybe both) are multiplied by your Efficiency modifier. So if you, say, have 7 Efficiency, your shortage will be 10*1,7=17 (not sure how it is rounded). If you have Complacency 10 that means your projects are completed instantly and that could snowball the issue.
And I'm almost certain that due to calculation errors your PF could go into negative values and emerge from the other side, giving you thousands of PF.

[TAOBECIN NOV NORAB]

I can confirm at times having over 100,000 profit factor due to this.