The Scarcity Effect
Same thing, twice. Once abundant. Once almost gone.
What this is
Eight items in four hidden pairs. Each pair is the same thing, twice: a cookie, an online product, an art print, a restricted book. Once it is abundant, freely available to anyone. Once it is scarce: almost gone, limited, or forbidden. The pairs are not adjacent, they are scattered. For each scenario you move a slider predicting the average desirability people would report, where 50 is mild interest.
At the end I compute your Scarcity Gap: the average desirability you predicted for the scarce scenarios minus the average for the abundant ones. A gap near zero says you believe worth is intrinsic and supply is noise. A gap near 18 to 20 puts you inside fifty years of commodity-theory data.
A note before we start
Since Worchel, Lee & Adewole (1975) JPSP vol 32 handed people a cookie from a jar of ten or a jar of two, the finding has been blunt: identical objects are rated more desirable, more attractive, and worth more when they are scarce, with nothing changed but the supply. Brock (1968) named the principle commodity theory: a thing is valued to the degree it is unavailable. Brehm (1966) added reactance: block access to something and people want it more to win the freedom back. The unsettling part is how little the object has to do with it. The cookie was the same cookie.
No login. No data leaves your browser. Eight scenarios, roughly four minutes.