The art of benchmarking: Picasso prints and auction house performance

Finn R. Førsund and Roberto Zanola

Applied Economics, 2006, vol. 38, issue 12, pages 1425-1434

Abstract: The influence of the auction house on the price of comparable art objects is an issue in the economics of arts literature. The standard approach has been to run hedonic price regressions including the auction house as a dummy variable. The approach in this paper is to apply benchmarking tools developed in the efficiency and productivity literature directly to the auction house as a unit. New performance indices are developed based on a DEA benchmarking technique to analyse auction houses. The new indices discriminate well between auction houses by allowing one to identify both contemporaneous and inter-temporal performances. Additional best performance results are obtained for specific attributes.

View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://taylorandfran ... &id=L86454Q27410V3M2 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/subscription.html

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics is edited by Mark Taylor

More articles in Applied Economics from Taylor and Francis Journals
Series data maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().