Essays on Economics of the Arts

In the recent years, a vast number of economic studies focused on the art market and on its development, as well as on the artists as agents of a labour market with features that are particular of art market. However, really few studies analyzed the functioning of the art market as a whole with a theoretical approach, often considering the artist as nothing more than a simple producer of artworks. This dissertation aims to enrich the economics literature with the above-mentioned missing parts. In Chapter 2 we build a model for studying the price formation in the private art market in a context of complete information and full rationality, using a game theory approach. In this first part, the key variables in this market are the market powers of the agents in the market, that define what is the channel through which a certain artwork reaches the public market. Chapter 3 firstly better defines what are the economic and cultural values and how their formation works for artworks, and then it introduces in the just-created framework the effects of information asymmetry among the agents operating in the market, and behavioural aspects in the choices of some of them: besides market powers, also information has a key role in the art market,and it mainly depends on artists’ characteristics, as fame and talent. Chapter 4 empirically investigates these artists’ characteristics, creating a new measure for them, through the use of hedonic regression and quantile hedonic regression, finding that this measure presents a bimodal distribution in all the specifications we implemented, coherently with the superstar theory in the art market, and that there exist various effects than influence the ranking created using our measure.