Fake Purse Buyers: 46 Percent Eventually Splurge On Real Thing

How much does each of these rationales contribute to the value of high-end products? In a new working paper, "Rethinking Brand Contamination," Renee Richardson Gosline, an assistant professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, uses the phenomenon of counterfeit luxury goods to shed new light on this issue. Consumers, Gosline observes, struggle to distinguish the intrinsic qualities of real luxury goods from fakes; instead, they rely heavily on social cues to make those judgments. Indeed, when some consumers are shown pictures of people wearing luxury apparel, they are twice as confident in their ability to judge those products, and willing to pay twice as much for the apparel, as when those consumers are shown pictures of the goods alone.

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