The Art of Selling Art: Modeling Demand to Optimize Listings for Emerging Artists on Online Platforms

With Ishita Chakraborty and Sharmistha Sikdar

Novice art is a sub-segment of art produced by emerging artists and often sold in primary markets directly by the artists themselves. Emerging artists generally do not have institutional representations, e.g., galleries or auction houses, and thus face greater challenges in evaluating the value of their work and understanding fluctuations in market demand. This research builds and estimates a structural model of demand for novice art on platforms like Etsy using data from conjoint analyses experiments. We quantify customer willingness to pay for listing attributes (e.g., price, dimensions, materials, ratings, title, images) and simulate market demand under counterfactual scenarios. Using these estimates, we develop an AI-based listing tool for emerging artists to recommend the optimal combination of listing attributes to highlight that would maximize their artwork visibility and hence sales.