THIS WEEK’S offbeat research comes from the University of Warwick, where Matthew Corder and Andrew Oswald have completed a study of the demand for personalised licence plates. The researchers wanted to gain a better understanding of the way people value things that they believe give then status but seem to have little other use.
They collected data from auctions of 2748 car number plates and analysed the factors that determined the prices paid for them. Key findings were that having a person’s surname in a number plate raises the plate’s value by £1300, having a person’s first name in a…
