What is it about?
People often buy certain items not just because they need them, but because owning these items sends a message about their wealth, taste, or social group. Traditionally, things like expensive sneakers or artworks have served this role. Recently, digital collectibles called NFTs have emerged as a new type of conspicuous good. This paper explores why NFTs become valuable, highlighting two main reasons: NFTs become desirable as they grow popular ("bandwagon effect"), and simultaneously become attractive precisely because they're rare ("snob effect"). We created a detailed dataset by combining records of NFT transactions with an AI analysis of their visual features. Our findings confirm that while popularity makes an entire NFT collection more valuable, buyers within that collection prefer NFTs that are harder to get, balancing the desire to belong with the urge to stand out.
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This page is a summary of: NFTs as a Data-Rich Test Bed: Conspicuous Consumption and its Determinants, April 2025, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3696410.3714724.
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