Being pre­vented from obtain­ing some­thing we desire simul­ta­ne­ously increases our desire for the item and decreases its even­tual attrac­tive­ness. That’s the coun­ter­in­tu­itive result from a study that shows the var­i­ous sur­pris­ing effects of “being jilted”.

We show how being “jilted”–that is, being thwarted from obtain­ing a desired outcome–can con­cur­rently increase desire to obtain the out­come, but reduce its actual attrac­tive­ness. Thus, peo­ple can come to both want some­thing more and like it less. […] In Exper­i­ment 1, par­tic­i­pants who failed to win a prize were will­ing to pay more for it than those who won it, but were also more likely to trade it away when they ulti­mately obtained it. In Exper­i­ment 2, fail­ure to obtain an expected reward led to increased choice, but also neg­a­tively biased eval­u­a­tion, of an item that was merely sim­i­lar to that reward.

It seems that by being unavail­able our expec­ta­tions are raised to an unrea­son­able degree and we even­tu­ally become dis­ap­pointed. I guess this is a warn­ing for those think­ing of scarcity mar­ket­ing.