How to define rarity? Rarity is always a crucial parameter which determines the value of a collection item. I do believe the "rare" terminology is not an unfamiliar word for us, you may always see or heard this term while someone would like to let go their collection item. However, do they tell the real story of "rare"? That is always a question mark for us.
According to my personal point of view, most of the Malaysian collectors may conceive a wrong perception about the rare definition. For coin or paper money collection, rarity should not be measured according to its mintage volume, although the mintage volume may proportionally related to its rarity but it is not absolutely correct. The right way to assess the rarity should base on the number of exists found in moment of decision making. In other words, the rarity prescription may subject to change if another number of new founds realised. Few years ago, such definition was always be claimed as academic views rather than practical reference due to the limited of information to assess its number of existence.
The whole numismatic market context was altered, after the awareness of grading coin/paper money was substantially increasing. The registry population reports gave us a reliable statistics on how to explore the volume of existence for difference varieties of numismatic items and the statistics are transparent to the collectors. However, the registry report also embeds some weaknesses in which it failed to capture the number of coins or paper money cross-over between the different grading companies. With the assumption made that the cross-overed volume is not significant in general, the statistics is still playing its role as a great reference to us.
Insofar, there are few parameter of measurements on how to define the rarity of a numismatic item. Although, there are seem differently with each other’s but they are holding the similar principle indeed on the philosophy of define the rarity.
Let looks at how Shelton defines rarity.
