EXPRESS: How Social Cues Drive Popularity in NFT Art Markets
How do consumers form preferences when they cannot rely on established quality standards? We examined this question in the context of non-fungible token (NFT) art markets, where buyers lack evaluative anchors such as provenance, conventional aesthetic criteria, or institutional endorsement. We demonstrated that view counts, a social cue that reflects others' attention, are one key attribute. Across a 150-day observational dataset (N = 1,459,979), a pre-registered 20-wave panel study, and six experiments, we documented that artworks that attract early views accumulate disproportionately greater attention over time, while other artworks fall further behind. We showed that this “snowballing” effect is driven by investment motives. When consumers approach markets with the motive to invest rather than collect, they rely on others' attention as a proxy for market value. Two structural features of the NFT market amplify this reliance: high price volatility and purely digital ownership, both of which heighten the salience of investment outcomes. By attenuating volatility or introducing tangible ownership cues, we diminished this reliance on social signals. Our findings extend theory on social influence and digital consumption, demonstrating that in the absence of objective quality standards, social cues shift from supplementary information to the primary basis for preference formation.
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- 10.1177/00222429261460019
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