Browsing by Author "Shortland, Anja"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Governance under the shadow of the law: trading high value fine art
    (Springer Verlag, 2019-09-20) Shortland, Anja; Shortland, Andrew J.
    The market for paintings by well-known artists is booming despite widespread concern about art crime and difficulties in establishing provenance. Public law enforcement is imperfect, and court cases often are deemed problematic. So how is the thriving art market governed in practice? We analyze the protocols used by the top auction houses to identify and resolve problems of illicit supply—fakes, forgeries and items with defective legal titles—through the lens of institutional analysis. We uncover a polycentric private governance system in which different actors govern distinct but overlapping issue areas, motivated by profit, prestige, or the search for truth. When the financial stakes rise, opportunistic behavior undermines the credibility of private governance. We argue that as litigious, super-rich investors entered the art market, the interaction between public law and the traditional private governance system restricted the supply of “blue chip” art, driving the escalation of prices.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Shades of gray: product differentiation in antiquities markets
    (The Association of Private Enterprise Education (APEE), 2023-06-01) Shortland, Anja; Winton, Sami Fortune
    The market for antiquities is characterized by quality uncertainty in two senses. First, most market participants cannot distinguish between genuine antiquities, fakes, and forgeries. Second, it is difficult to identify stolen, looted, and illegally circulating artifacts. Trading in high-quality antiquities thus requires solving an Akerlofian lemons problem in two dimensions. However, because quality is so opaque, many buyers are indifferent to one or both dimensions. This creates what might be termed a lemons opportunity: entrepreneurs create institutions to maintain separate platforms for trading artifacts of different quality profiles. We analyze the private for-profit governance that facilitates transactions in eight submarkets and protects them from criminality, opportunism, and law enforcement.