On Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa Week: What do Antiques Roadshow and NFTs have in common?
Soogand Alavi, assistant professor of marketing, says more than you might think.
Soogand Alavi is an assistant professor of marketing in the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business. She studies emerging technologies such as NFTs and the economics of Blockchain-based marketplaces. She also studies online platforms and social media, around topics like online advertising, and algorithmic bias. She uses methods from Machine Learning and Causal Inference, Econometrics, and Unstructured Data Analysis in her research. She obtained her Ph.D. in Quantitative Marketing, at The University of Texas-Dallas and her undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering at Sharif University of Technology.
What NFTs and “Antiques Roadshow” Have in Common
If you’ve ever watched Antiques Roadshow, you know how provenance works. Someone brings in an old baseball bat, and it turns out Babe Ruth gave it to their great-grandfather. Suddenly, that bat is worth a fortune—not because it’s made of special wood, or that it can significantly boost game play, but because of who owned it. That’s provenance: the story of where an item came from and who’s owned it.
We wanted to see if the same thing happens with digital items—specifically NFTs. We focus on Gods Unchained, a blockchain-based card game where each card is an NFT—meaning it’s a unique, traceable digital asset. These cards are both collectible, since they may appreciate in time, and functional, since they can also be used in gameplay. This hybrid nature allows us to explore how provenance affects buyer decisions in a way that spans both collecting and using.
We analyzed over 13,000 bid-level observations on OpenSea, and we find that provenance significantly influences NFT valuations—but mostly through collectible value. Cards previously owned by celebrity players or experienced traders tend to receive higher bids. The effects are especially pronounced for rare, high-tier cards. On the other hand, use value—like whether a previous owner played the game—didn’t significantly impact bids, likely because buyers already have access to gameplay-related information, so they don’t rely on provenance for that.
What does this mean? If you’re a seller, having a strong reputation—especially if you’re known in the community—can boost what buyers are willing to pay. And if you’re a platform, making ownership history more visible could significantly impact trades.
Bottom line: Just like in the physical world, ownership history matters in the digital world too. Provenance is more than metadata—it’s a powerful signal in shaping economic value, especially as NFTs expand beyond collectibles into functional and experiential domains.
