Reading between the lines in the art market: Lack of transparency and price heterogeneity as an indicator of multiple equilibria
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The hypothesis of a single deterministic price structure in the art market is unrealistic because of price dispersion , heterogeneity, limited information, and a lack of price transparency. Considerable price heterogeneity is associated with differences in quality; however, objective measurement of artistic quality is difficult, which reinforces the problem of lack of transparency in the art market. Applying finite mixture models to a sample of Surrealism paintings sold at auctions during 1990–2007, we test the hypothesis that the art market's lack of transparency is transferred to the art price system, which results in a fragmented market, characterized by the coexistence of different segments with various informational requirements, rules, and prices. Indeed, we find three distinct segments in the high end of the market, each with its own price structure. Furthermore, we identify a direct and an indirect effect on hammer prices exerted by the leading art auction houses.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it