Statistical methods are widely used for valuation (prediction of the value at sale or auction) of a unique object such as a work of art. The usual approach is estimation of a hedonic model for objects of a given class, such as paintings from a particular school or period, or in the context of...

Liability rules affect the incentives of intermediaries to disseminate and curate creative works, in particular when works build on the work of predecessors and they are potentially infringing copyright. In an application to the visual arts, we show that appropriation artists borrow images from...

We provide evidence that culture is a source of pricing bias. In a sample of 1.9 million auction transactions in 49 countries, paintings by female artists sell at an unconditional discount of 42.1%. The gender discount increases with measures of country-level gender inequality — even in artist...

We analyze the guarantees that art-auction houses offer from an options viewpoint. This approach allows us to derive analytical expressions to value the positions involved in such arrangements. We further validate these formulas with a Monte Carlo simulation applied to a realistic example....

This paper investigates the informational content of aggregate prices in the fine arts auction market. A Mixed Data Sampling (MIDAS) modeling approach is proposed to forecast year-end art prices, using higher frequency variables related to the stock and bond markets and to art market sentiment....

The death of an artist constitutes a negative shock to his future production; it permanently decreases the artist's float. We use this shock to test predictions of speculative trading models with short-selling constraints. Symmetrically to Hong et al. (2006), where an increase in float decreases...

Aggregate art price patterns mask a lot of underlying variation — both in the time series and in the cross-section. We argue that, to increase our understanding of the market for aesthetics, it is helpful to take a micro perspective on the formation of art prices, and acknowledge that each...

In the secondary art market, artists play no active role. This allows us to isolate cultural influences on the demand for female artists' work from supply-side factors. Using 1.5 million auction transactions in 45 countries, we document a 47.6% gender discount in auction prices for paintings....

While there are no significant investment characteristics that inhibit art from being considered as an asset, a major hurdle has long been the lack of a systematic measure of its financial performance. Due to its heterogeneity (each piece is different) and its infrequency of trading (the exact...

This paper contains a new review of the research of the last decade that has been designed to shed light on how the art auction system works, what it indicates about price formation, and how well it performs. We begin with a short description of the mechanics of the auction system and then...