“ If this were the place to go into details… I would prove that if one sees a handful of powerful and rich men on the pinnacle of grandeur and fortune, while the crowd grovels below in obscurity and wretchedness, it is because the former value the things they enjoy only to the extent that the others are deprived of them and because even without changing their conditions, they would cease to be happy if the other people ceased to be miserable. ” – Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, 1755.

These words are of utmost importance when it comes to psychological economics and consumer behavior. It is because of this setting that a person’s pleasure for possessing a good increases in others’ unmet desire for it. This strange but relevant behavior of consumers is termed as ‘Mimetic Dominance’.   If we broke down the term- mimetic means to imitate and dominance is to be superior. In this way mimetic dominance is how we take pride in that fact that we got something someone else didn’t. As a consumer, we acted out our superiority.

Mimetic dominance is an up and coming subject of research, but the theory can be summarized with these key characteristics:

• A person’s predisposition to keep a product heightens in its relative scarcity.

• It represents a person’s fascination with comparative success, position on the social ladder, and the feeling

of superiority.

• This endowment effect is social in the aspect that it solely relies on the owner’s beliefs about the wishes

of others.

Classic auction theory claims including more bidders would increase competition and therefore bring the highest bid. However, mimetic dominance proves otherwise- predicting higher bid generation through exclusion rather than inclusion. That’s how we can cheat the auction theory.

Now let us take a situation where you are selling a pair of exclusive Jordan Diors. Randomly excluding active bidders who desire these shoes increases the force of mimetic dominance in those who are still left with a chance to buy this luxury commodity. This exclusion would lead to a decrease in the number of active bidders and as classic auction theory predicts, the revenue would decrease.

However, it has been proven statistically that mimetic dominance might just lead to antithesis results. It is to be noted that mimetic dominance is most explicit in individuals driven by social motives. Therefore, for the potential winner of the auction, the chance that an excluded individual has a larger unmet desire for the shoes boosts his own value and ownership of them. As a result, this inducement leads to aggressive and consequently higher price bidding among remaining bidders.