Journal of Marketing 2025
Neither a Picasso nor a Leonardo da Vinci: An Examination of Novice Artwork Pricing with Multimodal Data
Abstract
Novice art pricing is an understudied domain. Novice artists operate as microenterprises, making crucial price-setting decisions. Research shows that newcomers often risk overpricing or underpricing their work, and existing online tools offer basic, cost-based pricing advice. Using a three-study framework, the authors examine novice art pricing on Etsy, where artwork listings include structured data, images, and textual descriptions. They first analyze how these inputs relate to final selling prices using a hedonic regression on structured data, followed by a multimodal fusion deep learning model that integrates structured, visual, and textual features. The results show that features related to artist authenticity (e.g., certificates), customer service (e.g., shipping, returns, personalization), and art style (e.g., genre) are important price predictors. Thus, novice art sales on online platforms exhibit some features typical of mature art markets (e.g., authenticity and reputation) but emphasize customer-focused services. Finally, using a Cox proportional hazards model, the authors show that, while higher artist reputation is associated with faster sales, discounting correlates with longer time on market. These associations suggest the importance of price setting. From these insights, the authors develop a price recommender application that predicts both selling prices and time to sell, offering practical guidance for newcomer artists and online platforms.
- DOI
- 10.1177/00222429251408346
- Sources
- openalex