{"id":58867,"date":"2026-04-20T15:46:51","date_gmt":"2026-04-20T15:46:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digitionary.com\/glossary\/greshams-law\/"},"modified":"2026-04-20T17:41:16","modified_gmt":"2026-04-20T17:41:16","slug":"greshams-law","status":"publish","type":"glossary","link":"https:\/\/digitionary.com\/en\/glossary\/greshams-law\/","title":{"rendered":"Gresham&#8217;s Law"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Gresham&#8217;s Law is named after the British financier Thomas Gresham (1519-1579), who was posthumously honored. Its principle, &#8220;bad money drives out good,&#8221; illustrates the phenomenon whereby, when two types of currency coexist, a rise in the value of precious metals leads to the withdrawal of the higher-quality currency, as its intrinsic value exceeds its face value. This higher-quality currency is then withdrawn from circulation to be hoarded or melted down, while the lower-quality currency, lacking significant intrinsic value, continues to circulate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Applied to the field of marketing, this law highlights the fact that a high-quality or technologically advanced product compared to its competitors does not automatically guarantee market dominance. It can be dethroned by a less sophisticated but more affordable product that fully meets consumer needs. To describe this phenomenon, American marketing experts sometimes use the expression &#8220;to betamax&#8221;, in reference to the history of Sony&#8217;s Betamax video recorder, withdrawn from the market in the mid-1980s in favor of JVC Matsushita&#8217;s VHS, which was less efficient but more widely accessible and widespread.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gresham&#8217;s Law is named after the British financier Thomas Gresham (1519-1579), who was posthumously honored. Its principle, &#8220;bad money drives out good,&#8221; illustrates the phenomenon whereby, when two types of currency coexist, a rise in the value of precious metals leads to the withdrawal of the higher-quality currency, as its intrinsic value exceeds its face [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","meta":{"wds_primary_glossary-categories":0,"footnotes":""},"glossary-categories":[102],"glossary-tags":[],"class_list":["post-58867","glossary","type-glossary","status-publish","hentry","glossary-categories-intellectual-property-marketing-law"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitionary.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/glossary\/58867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitionary.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/glossary"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitionary.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/glossary"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitionary.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/digitionary.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/glossary\/58867\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitionary.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"glossary-categories","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitionary.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/glossary-categories?post=58867"},{"taxonomy":"glossary-tags","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitionary.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/glossary-tags?post=58867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}