Price determinants and genre effects in the Korean art market: a partial linear analysis of size effect

This paper examines the price determinants of paintings in the Korean art market in the context of a hedonic price regression to investigate whether the hypothesis of the modified unit pricing system holds for the pricing of Korean modern and contemporary paintings. Using Korean auction data, I show that the parametric results provide overwhelming evidence that Korean art pricing does not function in accordance with the modified unit pricing scale. However, I re-examine this hypothesis using a semiparametric partial linear regression that does not require the prespecification of a functional form prior to estimation. Rather, the semiparametric approach allows the data to determine the exact form of the size-price profile. This result confirms that the modified unit pricing system applies to the Korean contemporary and modern painting market.