RESUMO
Intellectual property rights have changed the market value and direction of artistic innovation throughout art history, in particular when new creations built on the art of predecessors. In this paper, we test how changes in legal frameworks and litigation risks affected market value and commercial trade around artistic reuses in the figurative arts and the 'Appropriation Art' movement in particular. Appropriation artists borrow images from different sources and incorporate them into new, derivative works of art. By doing so, they risk infringing copyright but also put auction trade and artwork availability at litigation risk as liability can extend to market intermediaries, such as auction houses, museums, or galleries. Using a differences-in-differences model and large-scale online data, we investigate the causal impact of the prominent Cariou v. Prince U.S. higher court decision on intermediary trade and the availability of artworks on sale in the Appropriation Art. As an exogenous shock, this decision changed the perceived litigation risk for market intermediaries around what constitutes fair use. Following the court decision, we find a temporary decline in the total number of global auctions in the Appropriation Art, a lower sales probability of these artworks, and a relocation of related auctions to non-U.S. houses.
RESUMO
There is a large literature in behavioral economics contradicting the empirical prediction of rational choice theory once applied to auctions. The issue is of particular relevance due to the large use of auctions in mechanism design. One of the heuristics that may induce biased behavior is anchoring, namely the possibility that uninformative information influences choices. In this article we assess the impact of the anchoring effect in bidding for online auctions. Our aim is to isolate the anchoring effect of fixed price listing from the strategic bidding effect. Our empirical strategy is to use market segmentation induced by the presence of counterfeit products. Our results confirm the importance of behavioral heuristics and associate biases in auction. In particular we find price effects on auctions from upper and lower bounds(ceiling and foor) of the fixed price distribution and across run time. The results are robust with regard to various formulations of the baseline regression.
Hay una amplia literatura que contradice las predicciones empíricas de la teoría de la elección racional aplicada a las subastas. El asunto es de mucha relevancia puesto que las subastas son muy utilizadas en el diseño de mecanismos. Uno de los heurísticos que puede introducir sesgos en los comportamientos es el anclaje, o sea la posibilidad que información irrelevante tenga influencia en la elección. En este artículo medimos el impacto del anclaje en las pujas de las subastas en línea. Nuestra estrategia empírica consiste en utilizar la segmentación del mercado inducida por la presencia de productos falsos. Nuestros resultados confirman la importancia de los heurísticos y los sesgos en las subastas. En particular, encontramos efectos de precios en las subastas desde los límites máximos y mínimos de las distribuciones de los precios fijos y a través del tiempo de ejecución. Los resultados son robustos a varias formulaciones de la regresión básica.
