Robert Mislavsky

Assistant Professor of Marketing - Johns Hopkins University

Uncommonly Rare: Consumers Value Rarity in Digital Goods More in Larger Collections


Journal article


Joy Lu, Robert Mislavsky, Haiyang Yang
Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, vol. 10(2), 2025

Cite

Cite

APA   Click to copy
Lu, J., Mislavsky, R., & Yang, H. (2025). Uncommonly Rare: Consumers Value Rarity in Digital Goods More in Larger Collections. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 10(2).


Chicago/Turabian   Click to copy
Lu, Joy, Robert Mislavsky, and Haiyang Yang. “Uncommonly Rare: Consumers Value Rarity in Digital Goods More in Larger Collections.” Journal of the Association for Consumer Research 10, no. 2 (2025).


MLA   Click to copy
Lu, Joy, et al. “Uncommonly Rare: Consumers Value Rarity in Digital Goods More in Larger Collections.” Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, vol. 10, no. 2, 2025.


BibTeX   Click to copy

@article{joy2025a,
  title = {Uncommonly Rare: Consumers Value Rarity in Digital Goods More in Larger Collections},
  year = {2025},
  issue = {2},
  journal = {Journal of the Association for Consumer Research},
  volume = {10},
  author = {Lu, Joy and Mislavsky, Robert and Yang, Haiyang}
}

As more consumption moves to the metaverse, digital goods are becoming a substantial source of revenue for firms. Unlike their physical counterparts, digital goods have minimal supply constraints, and firms must make more deliberate decisions both on how to set the total supply of a product and how to distribute features within a product line. It is thus critical to understand how these decisions impact what consumers are willing to pay for digital goods. In an analysis of over 800,000 sales across 40 major NFT (non-fungible token) collections, we investigate how collection size and feature rarity are associated with an item’s transaction volume and average selling price. We find that, while rare items within a collection sell for more on average, this effect increases for larger collections. Additionally, while NFTs in larger collections do not have lower selling prices, on average, larger collections tend to generate more sales volume.