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on Cultural Economics |
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Issue of 2026–09–21
four papers chosen by Roberto Zanola, Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale |
| By: | Roshan Ghadamian (Institute for Regenerative Systems Architecture) |
| Abstract: | The global art market is one of the oldest and most valuable asset markets, and it lacks the institutional features ordinarily required for market coherence: standardised asset representation, public transaction records, aggregate price discovery, and persistent inventory accounting. This absence is commonly attributed to the subjectivity of artistic value, to norms of exclusivity, or to resistance to quantification. This paper argues instead that the opacity is architectural. The market lacks a shared market constitution capable of jointly representing supply, demand, provenance and realised exchange. Platform-level innovation – digital marketplaces, social commerce, provenance ledgers – fails not for want of adoption or technology but because platforms cannot substitute for missing institutional layers. The art market is characterised as pre-institutional: exchange without the coordinating structures that turn repeated bilateral transactions into a market system. â The consequences run past price. Without a secondary layer carrying signal forward, value must be re-produced each cycle, and structural risk lands on artists – not as a social problem imposed on the market but as an endogenous property of its architecture. â–¶ The paper's own strongest claim is that the market is not unconstituted but bifurcated: a small canonised tier in which value is stabilised by institutional capture, and a large tier that is pre-institutional. That tier is not merely richer – it built the four conditions and the binding authority the public tier lacks, in catalogues raisonnés, published auction results, provenance chains and attribution that settles disputes. Same goods, same law, two information regimes, two outcomes: a within-market comparison, and the only evidence here that bears on whether the architecture comes first. |
| Keywords: | market constitution, architectural absence, art market, pre-institutional markets, price discovery, symbolic markets, artist precarity, secondary markets, institutional capture |
| JEL: | Z11 D47 G14 L14 D82 |
| Date: | 2026–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:evk:wpaper:art-market |
| By: | Bartosz Jusypenko (University of Warsaw, Faculty of Economic Sciences) |
| Abstract: | Economic valuation of heritage conservation depends on what respondents expect to happen without the implementation of a proposed intervention, yet this no-program counterfactual is often left implicit. We examine whether explicitly directing respondents to consider potential heritage loss affects stated willingness to pay (WTP) for renovation of a building and whether the contribution of information about adaptive reuse depends on whether such loss enters the valuation decision. A contingent valuation survey of 452 adult residents living near Pückler Palace, a deteriorating historic building in Poland, used a 2 × 2 randomized design combining a loss-consideration prompt with information about a genuine proposal to adapt the renovated palace as the new premises of the Museum of Ceramics. WTP was elicited as the maximum mandatory one-off levy respondents would support within an advisory-referendum framework. Among respondents not assigned to the loss-prompt treatment, a post-valuation question identified spontaneous consideration of heritage loss. Two-part models separated the probability of positive WTP from the amount stated among positive responses. Respondents assigned to the loss-prompt treatment had approximately twice the odds of reporting positive WTP and stated 61% higher amounts among positive responses. Among unprompted respondents, spontaneous loss consideration—reported by 54%—was associated with 92% higher positive WTP. Reuse information appeared to contribute more when heritage loss was not otherwise considered. The findings show that common information about an asset’s current condition need not produce a common understanding of its expected future without the proposed intervention. Stated preference surveys should therefore specify this trajectory with sufficient clarity and credibility that respondents are evaluating a common underlying policy change. |
| Keywords: | cultural heritage, historic preservation, adaptive reuse, contingent valuation, stated preferences, prospect of loss |
| JEL: | C51 H43 Z18 Q51 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:war:wpaper:2026-27 |
| By: | Roshan Ghadamian (Institute for Regenerative Systems Architecture) |
| Abstract: | The rise and collapse of the NFT art market is commonly explained through speculative excess, technological immaturity, or cultural backlash against financialisation. This paper argues that NFTs failed as art markets for a more fundamental reason: they attempted to constitute a market for symbolic goods through technical representation and transaction recording, without the institutional authority required to stabilise value across time. Treated as a natural experiment in market constitution, NFT infrastructures closed several deficits long identified as sources of art-market fragility — token-level standardisation, persistent provenance, public transaction histories, frictionless global exchange. âš ï¸ The first is narrower than it is usually stated: what a token records unambiguously is ownership of the token, and buying one does not ordinarily transfer copyright or ownership of the underlying work. For a brief period one further rule, enforced creator royalties, introduced partial temporal continuity between primary and secondary markets. Those mechanisms had no constitutional grounding. Royalty enforcement rested on voluntary platform coordination rather than binding mandate, and was unstable under competitive pressure. As marketplaces disavowed governance authority and competed on volume, the constitutive rules collapsed: comparability fragmented across venues, arbitrage displaced judgement, and creators were pushed back into high-velocity primary sales. â–¶ The episode is evidence rather than analogy because one constitution succeeded while another failed. A transactional constitution governs who may exchange and whether the exchange binds, and here it was unusually strong. An informational constitution governs whether what was exchanged stays comparable to what is exchanged next, and here it never existed. A market can have excellent records and no memory. â The result is a stress test, not an anomaly. Where authority is absent, increased visibility and liquidity amplify volatility rather than stabilising value — and the two things this paper calls authority turn out to be different. |
| Keywords: | market constitution, institutional authority, NFTs, creator royalties, symbolic goods, platform governance, comparability, hyperfinancialisation, formalisation |
| JEL: | Z11 D47 G14 L86 K20 |
| Date: | 2026–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:evk:wpaper:nfts |
| By: | Eleonora Guarnieri; Ana Tur-Prats |
| Abstract: | Why do some cultures go extinct while others prevail? In this paper, we show that a society's risk of cultural extinction, proxied by language loss, is shaped by its ancestral gender norms and by how these norms differ from those of competing cultures. Using the Ethnologue and the Male Dominance Index for a global sample of languages, we start by showing that languages from more gender-equal societies face a higher likelihood of extinction than those from male-dominant societies. We propose a conceptual framework in which male-dominant societies are more expansionist via two channels: (i) military capacity sustained through surplus extraction, and (ii) demographic pressure through women's specialization in domestic and reproductive labor. As a result, they expand at the expense of more gender-egalitarian groups. We test this prediction in two empirical settings. Leveraging European colonization as a natural experiment, we find that Indigenous societies with more gender-equal norms than their colonizers are more vulnerable to cultural extinction. We examine alternative pre-colonial societal arrangements and find that cultural extinction is best explained by asymmetries in male dominance rather than in hierarchy or dominance more broadly. Exploiting local variation in neighboring groups' gender structure across Africa, we further show that languages from gender-egalitarian societies are less likely to survive in grid cells located close to male-dominant neighbors, with military capacity and population pressure predicting language expansion across the continent. |
| Keywords: | cultural diversity, language extinction, gender norms, Inter-group contact |
| JEL: | Z10 O10 F54 J16 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12968 |