Platforms, Portals, and Private Markets: A Structural Economics of Name, Image, and Likeness
Source: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ef391119789a9cde339c77aac1cdcbcc93cd7296 ↗
The authors reframe what looks like a labor market reform as something fundamentally different: a platform-mediated private market for intangible assets.
This distinction matters because it explains why standard wage-setting logic fails to predict NIL outcomes — athletes aren't selling labor, they're trading in illiquid identity assets whose value depends on narrative, exposure, and strategic positioning.
The transfer portal becomes the repricing mechanism that transforms latent valuations into contestable negotiations, much like how venture markets work through funding rounds.
For product directors this provides a framework for understanding how platforms don't just facilitate existing markets but create entirely new categories of tradeable assets, and why the resulting volatility and dispersion aren't bugs but structural features of asset markets operating under uncertainty.
Central argument
Fabozzi and Imerman argue that NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) reform did not simply deregulate a labor market but instead created a structurally new private market for intangible identity assets — assets whose pricing logic follows illiquid, narrative-driven valuation rather than wage-setting mechanisms. The transfer portal functions not as a job board but as a repricing event, analogous to a venture funding round, where previously latent valuations become contestable through competition and exposure. The resulting price dispersion and volatility are not market inefficiencies to be corrected but inherent features of an asset class operating under genuine uncertainty about future value.
Critique
The analogy to venture and private asset markets is analytically productive but may overstate the degree to which athletes exercise strategic agency comparable to founders or asset managers — most lack the institutional support, information access, and legal sophistication that characterize private market participants, which could mean the framework describes the market's structure accurately while underdescribing the power asymmetries embedded within it. The paper risks naturalizing dispersion and volatility as structural features without adequately interrogating who bears the downside risk when illiquid identity assets depreciate rapidly, a question venture market literature takes seriously through instruments like liquidation preferences and anti-dilution protections that have no NIL equivalent.
Why it matters for product
Product directors building platform businesses often misread their role as facilitating pre-existing transactions, when the more consequential question is whether the platform is constituting an entirely new asset category — as this framework suggests NIL platforms have done with identity. The implication for product strategy is that discovery and pricing mechanisms deserve as much architectural investment as the transaction layer itself, since the platform's design choices about visibility, portability, and narrative surface directly determine what can be valued and by whom. Teams evaluating growth metrics should also interrogate whether observed volatility signals an immature product or is instead a structural property of the market type they have built — a distinction with major consequences for roadmap prioritization.