An Exploration of Auction Price Concentration at the Artist Level

Tim Fry

Australian Economic Papers, 2025, vol. 64, issue 3, 299-308

Abstract: Auction price studies have typically had an object‐based focus, employing models to understand the prices of artworks. In this paper, we take an alternative focus on price heterogeneity, considering the artist, not the artworks, as the level of observation. Understanding how factors relating to the artist, such as gender and region, and their work, such as how diverse their oeuvre is, provides new insights into our overall understanding of price heterogeneity in the art auction market. Using panel data from the Australian Art Sales Digest for auctions containing artworks by Australian Indigenous artists, we investigate artist‐level price heterogeneity. We find significant impacts of product and supply diversity, regions, fame and the living status of the artist, particularly a strong death effect. Conversely, there are no significant effects of artist supply factors (number of works offered) or the gender of the artist.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8454.12394

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

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:ausecp:v:64:y:2025:i:3:p:299-308

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0004-900X

Access Statistics for this article

Australian Economic Papers is currently edited by Daniel Leonard

More articles in Australian Economic Papers from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().