Heterogeneity in Auction Price Distributions for Australian Indigenous Artists

Studies of auction prices for artworks typically relate the conditional moments of a single realised price distribution either to characteristics of the artist, the artwork and the auction or to pre-sale information. Using data from the Australian Art Sales Digest for the 100 best-selling Australian Indigenous artists over the period 1987–2014, we use finite-mixture models to understand heterogeneity in auction prices. Our results complement the existing literature by identifying new ways in which factors previously used in the literature may be related to price heterogeneity in a differentiated market such as that for Australian Indigenous art.