Why scarcity is the only honest way to price attention

Most digital inventory is not scarce in any physical sense. A network serves a second impression, a millionth and a ten-millionth at almost no additional cost, and the supply of places to put an advertisement grows with the supply of pages, feeds and minutes watched.

Where supply is effectively unlimited there is no natural price. What is left is willingness to pay, and the standard way to find that is an auction on every impression — not a design flaw but the correct answer to the problem as posed. Ruqu Wang's “Auctions versus Posted-Price Selling” sets out that absent the costs of running one, auctioning is always better for the seller, and remains better when buyers' valuations are widely dispersed. The consequence is that a buyer rarely learns a price in advance. They learn an outcome afterwards.

What happens when supply is fixed in advance and everybody can see the number. Dubai's Roads and Transport Authority runs open auctions of distinctive plates with the offering held constant at 90. At the 118th, in April 2025, those 90 carried a combined nominal value of AED 16.565 million and sold for AED 98.83 million — close to six times face, as Khaleej Times reported. At the 120th, on 27 December 2025, the same 90-plate offering raised AED 109,026,000, the RTA's highest result. The supply did not move. The price did.

The charity auctions are the same effect at higher intensity. The April 2023 Dubai sale offered 35 items — 14 vehicle plates, 10 du mobile numbers and 11 etisalat by e& numbers — and raised AED 97.92 million, of which AED 91.59 million came from plates. One plate, P 7, took AED 55 million of that: three-fifths of the entire plate take from a single lot, and the Guinness World Record for the most expensive car registration. For anyone following these prices, ThronePulse, GulfThrone's sister publication, keeps the Gulf's highest verified prestige prices, from plates to phone numbers, and publishes each month's sales, as in its September 2026 report.

These plates are not scarce because somebody decided they should feel exclusive. They are scarce because there is exactly one plate reading P 7, and no authority can issue a second without destroying the thing it is selling.

Worchel, Lee and Adewole's “Effects of supply and demand on ratings of object value” (1975) is the classic demonstration that the same object is rated more valuable when it is in short supply.

The status dimension has its own name. Harvey Leibenstein separated bandwagon, snob and Veblen effects in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1950; the term comes from that paper, borrowing Thorstein Veblen's “The Theory of the Leisure Class” of 1899. Bagwell and Bernheim's 1996 paper in the American Economic Review examines the conditions under which such effects arise from the desire to achieve social status by signalling wealth through conspicuous consumption.

A Veblen good is one whose demand can rise as its price rises, because the price is part of what is bought — which only holds where the price is visible. A discount negotiated in private signals nothing to anybody.

Because the two answer different questions, and only one commits the seller. An auction discovers what the highest bidder will pay on the day; a published price states what anybody will pay on any day, and removes the seller's discretion. Whether buyers regard a price as fair turns heavily on how it was arrived at — the standard framework is Xia, Monroe and Cox's “The Price is Unfair!”, which treats fairness as a judgement about the process at least as much as the number.

There is also modest evidence that showing buyers more than they need to see is rewarded. In a preregistered field experiment, Mohan, Buell and John found that disclosing what each ingredient cost raised the probability a given customer bought a bowl of soup from 2.3 per cent to 2.8 per cent across 9,227 transactions — a 21.1 per cent relative increase on a very small base. It is a real effect and a small one, and the authors note the limit: participants could not verify whether the disclosed costs were accurate. That limit is the point. Transparency is worth something only where the thing disclosed can be checked.

When the constraint is a decision rather than a fact. “Artificial scarcity” is a formal concept, not a term of abuse — Adel Daoud's encyclopedia entry defines it as scarcity induced into a system that could otherwise reach sufficiency.

Induced scarcity is not automatically wrong — a limited print run is induced, so is a fixed number of seats at a dinner. What makes it dishonest is unfalsifiability. If a seller says “only twelve places” and can quietly make it thirteen when a thirteenth buyer appears, the scarcity was a sales device all along. So the test is not whether a limit exists, but whether it is checkable, whether the price is stated before anybody asks, and whether the seller can be caught breaking either.

12 positions, fixed. No price for any of them: a brand contributes what it decides to contribute, the board sorts every brand by its running total, and the top 12 are the ones displayed. What is published against each position is the arithmetic — the total sitting in it, and therefore what it would take to pass it.

The ranking deserves the sceptical reading, because a seller who decides the order is a seller who can be bought twice. Two things constrain it. Every total is printed beside the brand holding it, so the order is arithmetic a reader can redo rather than a judgement to be trusted; and nothing enters a total until the money has reached the account, so the figure on the page is a receipt rather than a promise. There is no exception anywhere in it: every position including the throne goes to the larger total, and a dollar is enough to take any of them.

That is the honest form of the claim, narrower than the marketing version. This board does not assert that twelve is the right number, or that a position is worth what anybody paid for it. It asserts that the number is fixed, that every total is public before you ask, and that both can be checked afterwards. What it also publishes, which most ranked things do not, is the losing side: a brand passed out of the twelve keeps its name, its total and its day count on the Fallen list. The mechanics are in how the board works.