Wanting something more, purely because other people already want it

Demand for a product, a candidate or a trend can rise simply because it's visibly popular, independent of any change in price or quality. Pollsters have documented voters shifting toward a front-runner just to back a perceived winner, and markets see the same pull toward whatever everyone else already seems to be buying, a self-reinforcing loop with no upper limit built in.

— Harvey Leibenstein, Bandwagon, Snob, and Veblen Effects in the Theory of Consumers' Demand — Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1950

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