Mimetic Desire Undermines AI-Generated Value — The Exclusivity Premium
The mimetic foundation
Rene Girard’s concept of mimetic desire holds that people do not desire objects only for their intrinsic properties. They desire them because other people desire them, and they desire them more when others cannot have them. This is not a marginal curiosity — it is a central driver of economic behavior once basic needs are satisfied.
The idea predates Girard. Augustine wrote about libido dominandi, the pleasure of possessing what others are denied. Hobbes placed competition for glory at the center of human conflict — people seek “eminence” over others, and this drive is inherently comparative and never satiated. Rousseau distinguished amour de soi (basic self-preservation) from amour propre (the need to be regarded as superior), calling the latter the engine of social life and the source of most of its miseries.
Dave Hickey put it plainly: nobody who buys Armani is buying a better way to keep warm. They are buying the brand, the meaning, the reputation, the fact that other people know what it is and want it. The scarcity is what gives it meaning.
— Alex Imas, “What Will Be Scarce”
The experimental evidence
Exclusion doubles willingness to pay
Madarasz and Imas (2023, Review of Economic Studies) ran experiments where willingness to pay roughly doubled when subjects learned that a random subset of people would be excluded from the product — even though the product itself was identical. This was not status signaling (subjects were anonymous), not a scarcity heuristic (exclusion was random), and not about product quality. It was a pure preference for having something others do not.
Demand curves shifted substantially rightward as the prospect of exclusion increased. The effect was not small — median willingness to pay nearly doubled.
AI involvement destroys the exclusivity premium
Imas and Mandel (2025) found that AI involvement specifically undermines perceived exclusivity. Subjects bid for physical art prints that varied in described AI involvement:
| Condition | Exclusivity premium (one copy vs. many) |
|---|---|
| Human-made artwork | 44% |
| AI-generated artwork | 21% |
The mere involvement of AI made the work feel inherently reproducible and non-unique, regardless of how many copies were said to exist. AI does not just compete on price — it destroys the perceived scarcity that drives a large share of willingness to pay.
Why this matters for the post-AI economy
The mimetic component of preferences is inherently income-elastic. When people are poor, most spending goes to necessities where the producer’s identity does not matter. As incomes rise, a larger share goes to goods where the buyer is purchasing the story, the scarcity, the feeling of having something others want. This is what gives relational goods their high income elasticity: the exclusivity premium becomes a larger share of total value as incomes rise, and that premium is something only human-made goods can deliver.
This provides a behavioral microfoundation for why the relational sector (see The Relational Sector - Why Human Involvement Becomes the Product) has high income elasticity and therefore absorbs a growing share of spending as AI makes commodity production cheap. It also explains why demand collapse from AI automation may be less severe than feared: mimetic desire is comparative and therefore hard to satiate, acting as a release valve that keeps spending flowing even when basic commodity needs are met.
The connection to structural change
Standard structural change theory (Comin, Lashkari, Mestieri 2021) shows that income effects drive 75%+ of sectoral reallocation. Mimetic desire explains why income elasticity is so high for relational goods: the desire for exclusivity, status, and social meaning is comparative and ratchets upward without limit. As long as people care about having what others want, there is no natural satiation point for relational spending.
This distinguishes the argument from a simple “people like artisanal things” claim. The mechanism is rooted in a well-documented feature of human psychology: desire is not a relationship between a person and an object alone. It is a function of what other people desire.
Related Notes
- The Relational Sector - Why Human Involvement Becomes the Product — the sector that benefits from this dynamic
- Structural Change Theory Predicts AI Grows the Human-Intensive Economy — the macro framework
- Abundant vs Scarce After AI - The Bifurcation of Post-Scarcity — where the exclusivity premium sits in the scarcity taxonomy
- Creative Tools in the AI Era - Compression in the Middle, Taste at the Top — taste and judgment as scarce complements
- What Will Be Scarce - Alex Imas — source clipping (Alex Imas)