Autographs and the global art market: the case of hedonic prices for French autographs (1960–2005)

The market for autographs has become more open to international buyers since 1990. Our data set features a large sample of store and auction sales for selected authors every 5 years from 1960 to 2005. The estimation of a hedonic price function shows that page count, type of author, date and type of the document conditionally to author explain more than three quarters of the price differences. The apparent price of autographs increased by 7.7 % per year during the period, while the hedonic price index increased by 7.9 % on average. With a supply function responsive to market valuation, as well French autograph prices seemingly showing trend similar to art market index, the French autograph market has become more integrated in the global art market.     

eBay auctions for Third Eye Blind concert tickets

The band Third Eye Blind recently completed a tour, selling tickets exclusively on eBay. Many tickets were bundled with either VIP passes or autographed posters. These data are used to measure variations in price across different markets, as well as the premiums paid for different ticket types. Auctioning the tickets allows the seller to practice Third Degree Price Discrimination and bundling, without having to determine prices in each market and for each different bundle. We find: tickets bundled with VIP passes command a substantial positive premium; tickets bundled with autographed posters command a small negative premium; different prices emerge in different geographic markets; and auction prices are positively related to the fixed price at which tickets could be purchased by way of Buy-it-Now.

On the Symbolic Production of Digital Markets for Cultural Goods

This paper proposes and mobilizes a cultural economic framework to study the dynamic formation of digital markets for cultural goods. Adapting Hayek's theory of price to recent developments in the field of cultural sociology, it proposes the idea that an effective price system condenses information dispersed in society, and then enters into a performative process of symbolic communication that is perceived as ‘authentic’ by the consumers. After analyzing ‘artificial’ and ‘authentic’ current strategies aimed at producing digital markets for cultural goods, which are especially sensitive to the symbolic dimension of price, the article suggests the hypothesis that the digital market has been constructed as a zero- or quasi-zero-price economic space, and that it is the offline and material market of cultural products the one that collects the higher revenues derived from the ‘authentic’ generation of value taking place in the digital marketplace.     

Two games in town: a comparison of dealer and auction prices in contemporary visual arts markets

The article tests a couple of hypotheses relating to markets where demand is not taken as a given, but subject to sophisticated and encompassing price-building strategies. The study uses a data set that provides quoted dealer prices for medium-sized works of 100 leading visual artists from 1970 to 2004. These data are compared with auction price results for works by the same artists. The study reports significant discrepancies with respect to the relationship between the age of artists and prices paid for their works in the two markets, and with respect to general price developments in the two markets as measured by indices.

PERFORMING CALCULATION IN THE ART MARKET

The purpose of this article is to suggest a model of calculation in art markets based upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu and of actor-network theory. It will be argued that Bourdieu's concepts of capitals, economic, symbolic and cultural are useful for the specificity they lend to value making processes in the art market. However, actor-network theory's proposal of a distributed form of agency between humans and non-humans (e.g. calcualtion tools) is favoured here, posing a fundamental challenge to Bourdieu's notion of agency as resting solely at the hands of human agents. In order to understand the performance of calculation, this article explores the role of catalogues as an example of a market device in the Scottish auction market. It will be argued that the performativity of the catalogue cannot be fully understood without taking into account not only how it represents and enacts the value/s of aeshtetic objects, e.g. paintings, but also how this performance is mediated by its role as an aesthetic object.     

Non-marketizing agents in the study of markets: competing legacies of performativity and actor-network-theory in the marketization research program

One line of criticism leveled against studies of markets inspired by the economization research program [Çal??kan, K. &; Callon, M. (2009) ‘Economization, part 1: shifting attention from the economy towards processes of economization’, Economy and Society, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 369–398 and Çal??kan, K. &; Callon, M. (2010) ‘Economization, part 2: a research programme for the study of markets’, Economy and Society, vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 1–32.] is that their analytical priorities reflect an economics-centric perspective: they prioritize the study of market exchange itself and of agents promoting market framing, while leaving non-economic agendas and the broader contexts of markets both understudied and undertheorized. This weakness tends to be attributed to contingent analytical priorities, which can be remedied by extending the program’s focus without changing its theoretical tenets. This article, in contrast, suggests that these analytical priorities stem from a theoretical tension within the program, which is caused by the complete, instead of a selective adoption of the theoretical tools of the performativity agenda in the marketization program. As a result, while the program promotes the inclusion of non-marketizing agents through the notion of co-performation, its call to focus on those phenomena that agents qualify as ‘economic’ and on the making of market exchange delimits the analysis of non-marketizing agents to their helping/hindering effects on market framing. The solution proposed is to reassess some of the performativity-inspired tools of the program in favor of a more ANT-inspired approach to markets.     

On the Politics of Calculative Devices

This article examines the politics of calculative devices in one of the most successful areas of finance, the life insurance business. By empirically tracing an insurance applicant's risk trajectory, it analyses how calculative devices perform insurance underwriting through acting on insurance risk decisions. This allows one to document what calculative devices exactly do, and to point out the political effects of what they do. First, it highlights the fact that, contrary to thinking in terms of ‘the insurance logic’, there are multiple ways of calcuting life insurance risks. Second, it underscores the crucial role of calculative devices in that process by demonstrating how they align considerations as divergent as economics and medicine to perform a life insurance market. It then demonstrates the political effects of these calculative devices by making explicit how the latter contribute to the production of inequalities in calculative power in life insurance. In this way, the article links up insights from the performativity approach in the sociology of markets with the broader question of governing economic life. Such an approach, it is argued, provides the opportunity to open up the organization of economic markets and to put classic questions of justice and power struggles in economic markets on the agenda again.     

Valuation struggles over pricing – determining the worth of wind power

Public policies such as feed-in tariffs have been widely introduced to stimulate the development of renewable energies, and sustain a decarbonisation of the electricity sector. Proponents argue that these governance instruments safeguard public goods such as the climate – yet they are accused of creating political markets, and political prices, here understood as market distortion. This paper studies the ‘politics’ of pricing by following the adoption of the first feed-in tariff in France. Pricing as a way of achieving non-economic ends, such as climate mitigation, brings the values of several public goods into play, all the while prompting a translation of these values into a single price. Following the struggles over the pricing of wind power in the early 2000s, the study illustrates that rather than a pollution of the market sphere by that of politics, a politics of pricing can be observed in four distinct struggles: namely the framing of the public interest; valuation as the articulation of the future; the possible agencies of governance; and role of valuation methods and calculations.     

The Law's Markets

Recent research has suggested that one of the key ways in which economics and cognate calculative discourses and practices ‘perform’ the economy is through the drawing of conceptual boundaries between economic activities and entities of various sorts. One such boundary is the boundary between markets. This article shows that a critical contemporary arena for the differentiation of one product or service market from another is competition (or antitrust) law, which, through its work of market definition, seeks to identify the boundaries of competition: the location of the borders between meaningful economic spaces within which buyers and sellers encounter one another and establish prices. The article argues that in envisioning markets (‘the law's markets’), competition law simultaneously constitutes markets, and it demonstrates this through an empirical examination of the exercise of such law in three economic sectors: insurance, grocery retailing, and pay-television. It also shows, however, that competition law is perennially dogged by conflict – both over the placement of such conceptual boundaries, and over the very process of placement and the status of the market boundary itself – and that its application and effects can only be understood in this light.     

Price and the person: markets,discrimination, and personhood

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how pricing has historically been involved in the making up of persons and how the ability to ‘personalize’ price is reconfiguring the ability of markets to discriminate. We discuss a variety of contemporary pricing practices, and three types of personhood they produce: generic, protected, and transcontextual. While some contemporary developments in pricing draw on understandings of the person that are quite familiar, others are novel and likely to be contested. We argue that many newer pricing techniques make it harder for consumers to identify themselves as part of a recognized group. We conclude that contemporary price personalization should be understood in terms of the intensification of individualization in combination with dividualization, and as such, contributes to novel and consequential forms of classification.     

Uncertain hog futures: life,death, and arbitrage on the factory farm

ABSTRACT

Between 2013 and 2014, PED virus (PEDv) swept through American pig farms, killing millions of animals and causing a market panic that drove the prices of both physical pork and lean hog futures to all-time highs. However, a divergence between pricing in financial markets and on-farm realities allowed some producers to reap record profits via a unique form of biological arbitrage. This arbitrage was novel in that it allowed for an underlier (pigs) to be used to profit from fluctuations in the price of a derivative (lean hog futures). This article explores the case of PEDv to examine the entanglements and divergences between ‘real’ and ‘abstract’ values in financialized industries, paying particular attention to the schisms between the imaginaries and practices of actors in the financial and tangibly productive links of the agricultural value chain. To do so, it examines the historical co-constitution of American agriculture and the financial sector, and shows how in the contemporary moment these two ever-more-intertwined sectors are nonetheless marked by important differences. It argues that the nature of agricultural production can confound the expectations of finance, and highlights the fact that financialization entails contextually-specific practices that can lead to uneven and unexpected market outcomes.     

Cross-Field Effects of Science Policy on the Biosciences: Using Bourdieu’s Relational Methodology to Understand Change

This paper is based on a study that explored the responses of bioscientists to changes in national science policy and research funding in Canada. In the late 1990s, a range of new science policies and funding initiatives were implemented, linking research funding to Canada’s competitiveness in the ‘global knowledge economy’. Bourdieu’s theory of practice is used to explore the multi-scalar, cross-field effects of global economic policy and national science policy on scientific practice. While most science and educational policy studies use Bourdieu’s concepts ontologically, as “thinking tools” to theorize power, this study adopted Bourdieu’s relational epistemology, empirically linking objective positions of power (capital) with position-takings (rooted in habitus) towards market-oriented science. A relational epistemology made it possible to explore what forms and weight of capital scientists brought to bear on symbolic struggles over the legitimacy of a market and scientific logic. By empirically investigating how power shaped bioscientists’ responses to market-oriented science policy, this study was able to identify key mechanisms of change within the scientific field and between science, politics and the market. First, it identified the rise of a new form of entrepreneurial capital and a market-oriented logic that coexists alongside a traditional scientific logic within the scientific field in a bipolar system of stratification. Second, it illustrated changes in scientific practice, which contribute to change in the structure of the distribution of capital within the scientific field. This study challenges Bourdieu’s emphasis on a single dominant logic or symbolic order and challenges science and technology scholars to both use and extend his theoretical contributions.     

Cultured meat and cowless milk: on making markets for animal-free food

According to its proponents, animal-free animal food products, such as cultured meat and synthetic cow’s milk, have the potential to overcome various environmental, health and ethical challenges that have emerged around global animal product consumption and the industrial agriculture that is needed to support it. Apart from the myriad of technical problems making animal-free food products, critics have pointed out the blurry ontological status of the food and the ethical challenges therein, and have questioned the veracity of the various promissory narratives being produced. This paper considers animal-free food from a social studies of economies and markets (SSEM) perspective. As a market that currently mostly only exists in potential, an SSEM perspective can reveal the various social and material relations that comprise the (bio)capital formation that will underpin any market-to-be, an aspect of markets that are often invisible once markets are up and running. Moreover, this perspective details the intimate role markets have in establishing the ethical and ontological aspects of animal-free foods in a political economy shaped by neoliberalisation and financialisation.     

Digitalizing consumer society: equipment and devices of digital consumption

ABSTRACT

This special issue of the Journal of Cultural Economy focuses on the digitalization of consumption and its social, cultural, ethical, political, and gendered implications. It thus answers the call for more research on how digital devices spread from the purely personal domain to multiple sociocultural domains. Through their use, new cultural practices have emerged between consumers and these devices, and devices and markets, that lead to change, in terms of consumer demand, consumption norms, and issues of ethics, culture, and power. Closely examining the role that devices play in consumption behavior enables us to address the supposed manipulative power of hi-tech companies, infrastructures, and systems at the global level, and the view ordinary market actors hold of digital appliances as empowering tools at the local level. The papers in this volume bridge ‘actor network theory' and ‘consumer culture theory' from the perspective of market ‘agencements.’ Ruckenstein-Granroth and Beauvisage-Mellet, and Arriagada-Concha focus on the device-mediated relationship between large digital market infrastructures and consumer behavior; Petersson McIntyre and Licoppe unveil the societal and cultural underpinnings of digitalized markets. Last but not least, Sörum and Soujtis address the political dimensions and implications of our new digital consumer equipment and society.     

Conceiving multiple markets through network analysis: evidence from the emergence of the World Music market

The idea of multiple markets, conceptualised as a variety of concrete market configurations, was fruitfully developed in the socio-material networks research programme. However, it has not yet been able to solve the following puzzle: the differentiation and specification of multiple markets that exist at the same time in the same place. In this paper, I argue that White’s model of ‘markets from networks’ can contribute to filling this gap, since it is centred on the specification of a market’s structural and cultural boundaries. His model allows for the analysis of concrete market practices intertwined with more abstract concepts of markets formed in discourses that move firms and markets across different levels – from local markets to market sectors. An in-depth analysis of the emergence of the World Music market demonstrates the advantages of employing this model in the analysis of multiple markets.     

Working as a real estate agent. Bringing the clients in line with the market

ABSTRACT

Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews, this paper examines the market work performed by real estate agents in a residential market. The research explores how agents are engaged in market work to sell themselves, the market and the products in order to sell houses. Agents first invest in the clients by self-presentation techniques (likeability, availability, appearance, taste). They also work to bring the clients in line with the market by making them accept the market and its hierarchies; and finally, they enable clients to conform with the market, by relying on prices as signals and taste hierarchies. They act as market devices contributing to market valuation as they are engaged in making residential choices emerge, balancing the cold reality of the market with warm relationships to foster clients' engagement in transactions.     

Prices for superstars can flatten out

We reconsider Rosen’s economics of superstars model establishing, in the case of single-type consumers, a constant price-to-quality ratio. Rosen also conjectured that, in the case of multiple-type consumers, the normal course of consumer behavior forces the price-to-quality relationship to be convex and prevents it from being concave. We show that this conjecture is false and explain why there is no a priori reason to rule out concavity in the price-to-quality relationship. In this model, the market matches consumers to artists on the basis of quality: consumers of each type select only one level of quality, supplied by artists endowed with a specific level of talent. The concavity or convexity of the price-to-quality relationship is non-trivially related to the way both populations are matched. Consumers with poor knowledge have greater fixed costs above and beyond the price they have to pay on the market. They are therefore less reluctant when prices rise sharply and they specialize in levels of quality that entail a high marginal appreciation of quality: this can mean either a high or a low level of quality, depending on price curvature. With convexity, as Rosen pointed out, they turn toward superstars. Symmetrically, convexity encourages connoisseurs to turn toward low quality. But concavity too is fully possible: consumer–artist matching, for the same reasons, simply has the reverse effect. Connoisseurs go for great talents, whose price of quality flattens out. The global shape of the price-to-quality relationship (concave or convex) is determined by market clearing conditions and, more crucially, by the distribution of agents on both sides.     

Long- and Short-Term Portfolio Choices of Paintings

In their paper on price comovements of paintings, Ginsburgh and Jeanfils show that in three important markets (London, Paris and New York), prices of well-known and lesser known painters 'move together' (are cointegrated). They conclude that therefore, an investor may be indifferent between the two groups of painters. We show that this is not the case, since well-known painters are less risky, and that though returns may be comparable, the share of well-known painters in a portfolio of paintings might be as high as 90%. We also construct long-run and short-run portfolios and show that these may be very different. These short-term portfolios give interesting insights which help in characterizing each of the three markets.     

A Price Index for Art Market Auctions

This paper proposes a price index for modern andcontemporary paintings based on estimates and auctionprices. We use this index for the evaluation of theItalian art market and for comparisons with returns onother assets. During the period 1983–1994 art pricesincreased in line with inflation but returns onpaintings were lower than returns on financial assets.In the long run art prices are unrelated to financialassets prices, but a positive correlation with realestate prices emerges.     

The law of one price,noise and “irrational exuberance”: the auction market for Picasso prints

We use prices realized for Picasso prints at auctions worldwide, as well as the 100 prints that comprise his Vollard Suite, to test the law of one price: the proposition that identical art objects sold contemporaneously should command the same price regardless of the auction house or geographic region where the sale takes place. Picasso is the most prolific printmaker of the twentieth century and, from 1977 to 2004, his prints appreciated in price significantly faster than the prints of modern masters as a whole. We find that Picasso prints sold in the United States command higher prices than in Europe. However, prices realized at Sotheby’s in New York are no longer higher than at Christie’s in New York, nor at Kornfeld than at other auction houses. We find evidence of “irrational exuberance” in the transitory nature of the extraordinary prices realized for the Picasso prints included in the 1997 sale of the collection of Victor and Sally Ganz at Christie’s in New York. More generally, we find substantial noise in auction outcomes, a result well known to savvy auction goers.