Posted By:
Scot Reader
I agree that population reports cannot tell you much about absolute scarcity due to resubmits and the vast majority of cards that are ungraded or graded by another service. They can, however, tell you something about RELATIVE scarcity of cards within a set. But even there you have to price weight each subject before making comparisons since given the time and expense of grading there is more incentive to submit higher priced items than lower priced items--and therefore higher priced subjects are overrepresented in population reports.
One way to determine how overrepresented (or underrepresented) a subject is in a population report is to look at the average condition of graded examples of the subject. For example, the mean grade for T206 Honus Wagner examples in the PSA population report is 2.14, whereas the mean grade for T206 Nick Maddox examples is 4.52. Obviously this is not because the average condition of Maddox examples in the world is VG-EX+; it is because there is not sufficient price incentive for most people to send their P-F copies of Maddox to PSA whereas there is abundant price incentive for anyone who has an authentic Wagner to send it in for grading. Once population data are weighted for price, which can be done either by reference to the average condition of graded examples, book prices, or a combination of the two, then a reasonably good picture of relative scarcity emerges.