“We’re going to be the De Beers of synthetic wildlife products,” Matthew Markus said in 2015 (Cisneros-Montemayor, 2015). As the founder of a small Seattle biotech firm called Pembient, Markus had a plan with the clean elegance of an undergraduate microeconomics problem: bioengineer rhino horn that is genetically and physically indistinguishable from the real thing, sell it for one-eighth of the wild-horn price, flood the market, and watch the economics of poaching collapse. Two competing startups, Ceratotech and Rhinoceros Horn LLC, had already entered the same race (Funke, 2024). Investors followed. Headlines followed. A decade later, Rhinoceros Horn LLC has long since shut down, the wider synthetic-horn industry survives more as an artefact of media archives than of conservation policy, and several hundred rhinos are still poached every year in South Africa alone. The plan was not technologically wrong. It was economically incomplete.
The most rigorous statement of why it was incomplete comes from Frederick Chen’s 2017 paper The Economics of Synthetic Rhino Horns, published in Ecological Economics. Chen builds a formal model of the rhino horn market in which one or more firms can produce high-quality synthetic horns, and then asks the question that Pembient had treated as self-evident: under what conditions does this actually reduce the equilibrium supply of wild horn? The answer, in Chen’s framework, depends on two structural variables that the founder pitch tends to skip: how competitive the synthetic horn sector is, and how substitutable the synthetic product is for the wild one. When the synthetic sector is monopolistic, a profit-maximising producer has no reason to flood the market; on the contrary, it has every reason to restrict supply and keep prices high, because its margin depends on the very scarcity that drives poaching in the first place. And when consumers can distinguish the synthetic from the wild horn, even imperfectly, the substitute does not displace the original; it segments the market and may even raise the perceived value of authenticity at the top.
Chen pushes the logic one step further into a counter-intuitive recommendation. If a synthetic substitute is to genuinely depress demand for wild horn, it should not be marketed as a high-quality alternative. It should be engineered to be inferior in some functional respect, while remaining indistinguishable to the average buyer. That combination produces the classical conditions of adverse selection: buyers who suspect they cannot tell what they are getting lower their willingness to pay, the price of the entire category collapses, and the high-quality wild product is driven out of the market by the cheap fake. The reasoning is impeccable. It is also commercially unviable, because no profit-seeking firm has any incentive to manufacture a product engineered to disappoint its own customers. Chen’s most useful contribution to the policy literature is therefore not a proposal but a diagnosis: the goal of conservation and the goal of the synthetic horn industry are structurally misaligned, and any solution that ignores this misalignment will under-deliver or backfire.
The diamond market is the closest natural comparison case, and it is one I happen to know from both sides. Trained as a gemmologist before turning to economics, I spent my master’s thesis at TU Berlin running a vignette experiment on the acceptance of synthetic diamonds in engagement rings (Güçlü, 2024). The setup is informative for the rhino question because the gemmological situation in the diamond market is precisely the situation Chen assumes for horn: laboratory-grown stones share the chemical, optical, and crystallographic properties of mined stones so completely that distinguishing them requires specialised instruments and trained personnel. For the average buyer, and for the recipient of the engagement ring, the difference is unobservable. By the substitution logic that animated Pembient, the diamond market should have collapsed years ago. It has not.
What it has done instead is segment, and the segmentation is instructive. Lab-grown stones have captured a meaningful share of the broader fashion and lifestyle market, while the symbolic premium attached to natural stones in engagement contexts has proved remarkably resilient. My experimental data sharpens this picture. Across roughly five hundred and fifty respondents and three vignette scenarios, perceived commitment between a couple was significantly lower when the engagement ring contained a synthetic stone than when it contained a natural one, even though both were stipulated to be visually and gemmologically identical to any non-specialist observer. Acceptance dropped further, and dramatically so, in the third scenario, in which the customer purchased a synthetic stone and presented it to his fiancée as natural. Of the three experimental treatments designed to lift acceptance, only the moral framing of synthetic stones as the ethical choice produced a significant effect. A pure price-disparity argument did not move the needle. Neither did a scientific equivalence message. The substitute gained ground only when it was wrapped in a new story. It lost ground whenever it tried to borrow the old one.
Read against Chen, this is more than a curiosity from an adjacent market. It is empirical confirmation of his theoretical assumption from the side he could not test. Even where the technical conditions for substitution are perfect, where the consumer cannot identify the synthetic at the point of consumption, the symbolic differential between original and substitute survives. The diamond and the horn share the same Akerlofian information structure but produce opposite market outcomes. The reason is not in the gemstones or the keratin. It is in what the buyer is, in fact, paying for.
For diamonds, the answer turns out to be flexible enough to accommodate two products. The market has gradually learned to sell aesthetic value, ritual value, and symbolic value as a layered bundle, of which only the symbolic layer is anchored to natural origin, and even that anchor is loosening as younger cohorts come to treat the ethical narrative as itself a form of authenticity. For rhino horn, the answer is structurally narrower. Demand is driven, as the empirical literature on consumer motivations in Vietnam and China consistently shows, by status, by perceived rarity, and by the cultural authority of the wild origin (Truong et al., 2016). The horn’s value is not a property of its keratin. It is a property of the story told about how that keratin came to be in someone’s hand, and that story, in its consumer-facing version, requires the animal to have been killed for it. A bio-identical synthetic horn cannot enter this story without dissolving it. Either the synthetic is presented as authentic and the entire concept of authenticity is corroded, or it is presented as synthetic and the consumer routes around it back to the wild product. Markus himself, after several years of resistance from conservation NGOs, eventually conceded the point in different language. Intact horn, he told National Geographic in 2015, is what the market really desires, because it is “the ultimate marker of authenticity” (Actman, 2015). Doug Hendrie of Education for Nature Vietnam said the same thing more bluntly: status-driven rhino horn users want real horn from wild rhinos.
The deeper lesson, and the one I think generalises beyond either market, is that authenticity is not a property of materials. It is a property of narratives, and the substitution policies that succeed are the ones that engineer narratives, not molecules. The diamond market succeeded, to the partial extent that it has succeeded, because it was able to reorganise its own story: it kept the symbolic layer attached to natural stones for those who wanted it, and grew a parallel story (ethical, modern, environmentally legible) around the synthetic. The horn market resisted because its story does not admit of this kind of reorganisation. Its authenticity is constituted by an act, and the act is the killing.
In late 2024 I spent two months with an anti-poaching unit in Namibia, on private land where rhinos and elephants are protected from a market most of them will never enter. I had finished my own master’s thesis only a few months earlier, in which I had treated synthetic diamonds and synthetic rhino horns as broadly analogous solutions to broadly analogous problems. Standing on a reserve at dawn, watching a dehorned rhino move through dry grass with the practiced wariness of an animal whose body had already been edited by economics, I began to think the analogy holds only on the surface. Two markets, two stories, one substitute. Substitution is not a matter of materials. It is a matter of what the buyer is, in fact, buying, and what the buyer is buying is almost never the thing in their hand. The keratin is incidental. The killing is the product.
References
Actman, J. (2015, December 3). Can fake rhino horn stop the poaching of a species at risk? National Geographic.
Chen, F. (2017). The Economics of Synthetic Rhino Horns. Ecological Economics, 141, 180–189.
Chen, F., & ’t Sas-Rolfes, M. (2021). Theoretical analysis of a simple permit system for selling synthetic wildlife goods. Ecological Economics, 180, 106873.
Cisneros-Montemayor, A. M. (2015, July 7). The trouble with using synthetic rhino horn to stop poaching. World Economic Forum.
Funke, D. (2024, January 17). Could lab-grown rhino horns actually stop poaching? We may never know. NPR.
Güçlü, K. (2024). Analyzing Acceptance Factors and Commitment Levels: A Comparative Study of Natural and Synthetic Diamonds in Engagement Rings. Master’s thesis, Technical University of Berlin.
Truong, V. D., Dang, N. V. H., & Hall, C. M. (2016). The marketplace management of illegal elixirs: Illicit consumption of rhino horn. Consumption Markets & Culture, 19(4), 353–369.