Rotterdam Brown Bag Seminars in Finance

Speaker(s)
Marshall (Xiaoyin) Ma (Tilburg University)
Date
Wednesday, 11 April 2018
Location
Rotterdam

Color is a basic characteristic of all objects and is known to influence decision making. The aesthetic, psychological, and physical attributes of colors have long been studied, while the economic impact of color has been untouched. In this paper, we study the effect of color on pricing in the art auction market. We incorporate color attributes analyzed from 5482 images of non-figurative abstract art, auctioned from 1994 to 2017, into hedonic regressions. We find that a one standard deviation increase in the percentages of blue (red) hue in the painting leads to a significant premium of 10.63% (4.20%). The results are robust to various definitions of color decompositions, subsamples of multiple-color paintings, and various art schools. We also conduct laboratory experiments in China, the Netherlands, and the USA, with 465 subjects, and elicit their willingness-to-pay for paintings. Each subject views a sequence of single- and dual-color abstract art in a randomized sequence of hue variations and submits a bid. Emotions are measured by a self-reported Pleasure-Arousal scale immediately after viewing each artwork. We find that blue, red, and their combinations in abstract art elicit greater pleasure, willingness-to-pay, purchase intention, and ranking. A blue (red) single-color painting has an 18.57% (17.28%) premium in valuation compared to the average. The value of dual-color paintings is strongly correlated with the average value of the constituent colors. Although abstract art is visually stimulating, it is the emotion of pleasure that conveys the impact from color to valuation. Our results are consistent across all three cultures.