We find evidence for the behavioral biases of anchoring and loss aversion. We find that anchoring is more important for items that are resold quickly, and we find that the effect of loss aversion increases with the time that a painting is held. The evidence in favor of anchoring and loss...

Auction houses use both in-house and third-party guarantees for sellers who are concerned about the risk that not enough bidders will enter the auction for their works. Auction houses are compensated for guarantees by buyers’ commissions and successful sales after attracting important works of...

Roger de Piles (1635-1709) was a French art critic who decomposed the style and ability of each artist into areas of composition, drawing, color and expression, rating each on a 20 point scale. Based on evidence from two datasets that together span from 1740 to the present, this paper shows that...

We document the existence of pricing styles in the concert industry. Artists differ in the extent to which they rely on second- and third-degree price discrimination and in how likely they are to sell out concerts. Most strikingly, artists who use multiple seating categories are more likely to...

This paper investigates the reading of fiction books by 15-year-olds in 18 OECD countries. It appears that girls read fiction books more often than boys, whereas boys read comic books more often than girls. The intensity by which children read fiction books is influenced by parental education,...

Concert tickets can either be sold at a single price or at different prices to reflect the various levels of seating categories available. Here we consider how two product characteristics (the artist’s age and venue capacity) influence the likelihood that pop music concert tickets will be sold...

The tensions between books and book markets as expressions of culture and books as products in profit-making businesses are analysed and insights from the theory of industrial organisation are given. Governments intervene in the market for books through laws concerning prices of books, grants...

Media industries are important drivers of popular culture. A large fraction of leisure time is devoted to radio, magazines, newspapers, the Internet, and television (the illustrative example henceforth). Most advertising expenditures are incurred for these media. They are also mainly supported...

Books are an important factor of cultural transmission, but need, in most cases, to be translated. According to some authors, this may lead to a form of cultural domination, in particular of English, on other languages. All these papers ignore that the population speaking English as a first...

The Droit de Suite, known in the UK as Artists’ Resale Rights, provides an artist with the inalienable right to receive a royalty based on the resale price of an original work of art. This paper provides an empirical analysis of actual changes in the UK auction market for art that is subject...