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I think acting is a good example of what I'm talking about, where from an audience perspective utility is produced by marketing efforts. Wine and other Veblen goods function similarly.
Tom Cruise's fame and value is not produced purely or even primarily by Tom Cruise's talent, but by the combined effort of an industry, by agents and publicists and studios, and by Tom Cruise's own decisions to manage his image and fame to produce his stardom. He is a product of that system. ((Though Cruise is also a really good actor, in a lot of great films)) That used to be more true in old Hollywood than it is today, Tab Hunter is a good example, there's a great documentary on his career; Tab was made famous by the studio system that both made him big and protected him from the public consequences of his homosexuality, realized that the studio was making a lot of money off of him and tried to break out of the studio system, and his career immediately tanked because he no longer had the studio to make him big.
The audience watching Tom Cruise in a mediocre movie, say Jack Reacher, gets more utils out of watching the movie than they would watching the same movie with a no-name actor, because they like Tom Cruise. The person drinking a fancy rare bottle of wine from a fancy French vineyard is experiencing more utils in that moment than I get drinking two buck chuck, because of the marketing that convinces them that this is a great and rare bottle of wine. That kind of marketing genius is the talent and the labor and commitment that produces the utility for the customer.
A good example, more common to most experiences, is that fight fans get more out of watching the Heavyweight Championship of the world and pay more to watch it, than they do out of watching a smoker bout on the undercard of a local brawl, even if the latter is the more exciting fight. Most people get more out of watching the NBA finals than a great high school game. This is not the result of the players on the court, it is the result of the whole infrastructure of the league and the understanding that this is an important high level game. Donc...
Any random vintner can't just decide to do that. They need to work through decades of building industry credibility, making contacts, getting good reviews, building audience goodwill, and building a story of exclusivity that makes people think the bottles are worth a lot of money. It's not just a decision to charge more, it's a conscious project that takes a great deal of time and effort and talent. Most who set off down that path fail.
We can say that the customer is being defrauded because the literal product is the same, but that is to decide that the vast majority of people and huge portion of the economy is fake, and we should have strong priors that when we decide that everyone is an idiot we're engaging in an act of arrogance.
If Aella was stupid and lacked the cunning to build herself up, she wouldn't be a usable byword on this website, Tommy would have brought her up in the OP and we would have collectively gone "who?"
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