Goodnight Economics

Several years ago my first nephew was born, and so my wife and I bought him a book. We chose "Goodnight Moon", because it was pretty much the only modern kid's book we'd heard of.

Later on we heard that, of course, they had received several, several copies of that book because it was very popular. I felt kinda sheepish.

So when I had a child, I steeled myself to receive at least three to four copies of the book. Imagine my surprise when we got *none*.

In any case, to my great shame we had to actually *purchase* Goodnight Moon from amazon, which I figured was something only single parents with no living family would have to resort to.

I'm glad we did, my son loves the book very much and can already recite some portions of it unbidden, so I'm glad we did. But the whole situation made me wonder about this sort of economic phenomenon.

How could it be that years ago that you could receive any number of "Goodnight Moon" books, and this year you receive none?

Clearly this is some sort of new and undiscovered economic phenomenon which should be named after my dog.

Essentially, I imagine other people did exactly what I did, or heard from other people about how many copies of "Goodnight Moon" people received, and this essentially formed a feedback loop that prevented anyone from even considering purchasing that book as a gift afterwards.

I tried thinking of other examples, and the best I could come up with is Netflix gift subscription. Five to eight years ago these "three months or one year of free Netflix" was a common gift to give to introduce people to the service and to get to try it out, but these days it would be a ridiculous gift to give since the odds of someone already being a user are very high.

I'm sure there is a proper name for this phenomenon, when a commonly gifted product becomes so ubiquitous and popular that people essentially stop buying it, and until I do a proper Wikipedia search and find it, I declare it "The Moya Effect".

Honorary Economics Phd please!