Art market pricing in emerging economies

Taisia Pimenova, Valeria Kolycheva, Alexander Semenov, and Dmitry Grigoriev have published the article «Art pricing in the emerging markets: An empirical analysis» in  Emerging Markets Review . The paper presents an empirical analysis of the impact of public sentiment expressed on social media on artwork prices in emerging markets. Using a dataset of 3,282 paintings by Russian and Chinese artists, the authors demonstrate that both positive and negative public opinion significantly affect prices, while also identifying the moderating roles of collectors' investment intentions and geopolitical risk.

The Emerging Markets Review has published an article by Taisia Pimenova, Valeria Kolycheva, Alexander Semenov, and Dmitry Grigoriev titled «Art pricing in the emerging markets: An empirical analysis».

The study examines the determinants of artwork prices in emerging markets, with a particular focus on the role of public sentiment expressed on social media. The authors employ a hedonic pricing model with artist-level fixed effects to estimate these effects, while sentiment indicators are constructed using deep learning techniques applied to social media data.
The empirical analysis draws on a dataset comprising 3,282 paintings by Russian and Chinese artists sold at Sotheby's, Christie's, and Phillips auctions between 1999 and 2021. The results indicate that public opinion exerts a statistically significant influence on prices: positive sentiment is associated with higher prices, whereas negative sentiment correlates with lower valuations.

The study further investigates the moderating effects of collectors' investment intentions and the geopolitical risk index. The findings reveal that buyers who view art as an investment vehicle exhibit heightened sensitivity to negative public sentiment. In addition, elevated geopolitical risk is found to attenuate the relationship between investment motives and price sensitivity.

This research contributes to the literature on art economics and emerging markets by providing empirical evidence on the interplay between digital public discourse, macroeconomic uncertainty, and the pricing of cultural goods.