The picture above shows a can filled with an artist’s faeces
– a piece which sold for £97,250 in 2008. In 1961 the artist Piero Manzoni
released 90 cans of his own faeces as an act of mockery and defiance against
the world of art. Ironically, these pieces are now worth thousands of pounds
and in high demand with art collectors.
The bizarre price that people are prepared to pay for a can
of human faeces may be partially explained by the concept of scarcity. Since there
are only 90 cans available in the whole world, it makes the item more desirable
and makes people perceive the price of the item to be higher, making people
willing to pay thousands of pounds to possess this rarity.
Lynn (1989) did a study which demonstrates this phenomenon. They
used a between subject, 2x2 design with the first variable being scarce vs
abundant and the second variable being unknown price vs known price of the
item. Students were given some information regarding a particular wine. In the
scarce condition, they were told that there were only 5000 bottles of this wine
made whilst in the abundant condition, they were told that there were 50,000
made. In the no price condition, participants were not told the value of the
wine whereas in the known price condition, they were told that it could be
purchased for $20 per bottle.
The participants were then asked to rate the scarcity, the
expensiveness, the desirability and their willingness to buy of the wine they
had been given information about. The table below shows the results:
The table shows that when there was no price available, the
participants rated the wine which only had 5000 bottles (scarce condition) as
more scarce, more expensive, more desirable and stated a higher willingness to
buy the product than when there were 50,000 bottles (abundant condition). However,
when there was an acceptable price available, although the participants still rated
the product as more scarce, they there was no significant difference in their
expensiveness rating or desirable rating between the scarce versus abundant
wine, and they were still more willing to buy the scarce wine compared to the abundant wine.
This explains why people are willing to buy Artist’s Sh**
for ridiculous amounts of money. Since there are only 90 available in the
world, people see it as a desirable product, and since it was an innovative
idea of which nothing alike had ever occurred before, there was no price
information available, so people perceived it to be worth a lot and so are
willing to pay thousands to have it.
Reference
Lynn, M. (1989). Scarcity effects on desirability: mediated by assumed expensiveness?. Journal of Economic Psychology, 10, 257-274.
Reference
Lynn, M. (1989). Scarcity effects on desirability: mediated by assumed expensiveness?. Journal of Economic Psychology, 10, 257-274.
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