Desire, in most economic models, is treated as a given — people want things, and the interesting question is how they choose between them. The philosopher René Girard spent decades arguing this is exactly backwards. We don't want things independently and then compete for them. We want things *because* we see others wanting them. Girard called this mimetic desire — the deeply human tendency to take our cues about value not from the object itself, but from the wanting of a rival or model we've unconsciously chosen. This isn't imitation in a shallow sense. It's the borrowed nature of appetite itself. The business implication cuts deep: most of what we identify as 'customer demand' or 'market preference' isn't a stable signal about value — it's a social contagion that intensifies precisely when others are seen competing for the same thing. Scarcity marketing works not because rare things are better, but because they make desire visible. The competitor who seems to want your client most is the one who makes your client feel wanted. Before your next negotiation or product pitch, the useful question isn't 'what does this person need?' — it's 'who are they watching, and what does that person seem to want?'

Who have you unconsciously appointed as your 'model' in a current decision — the person whose wanting is quietly calibrating your own?

Drawing from Mimetic theory / Literary anthropology — René Girard