October 1, 2022
Congratulations to Clara and Ennio Piano on their forthcoming Journal of Law and Economics paper, “Bargaining over Beauty.” The Pianos (with some help) translated some 90 artistic commission documents from Latin. Here’s the abstract:
“We study contracting practices in the market for paintings of Renaissance Italy. Building upon insights from the economic analysis of contracts and qualitative analysis of primary sources, we first show that transaction costs threatened the relationship between buyer—the patron—and seller—the painter. We empirically investigate the channels through which transaction costs influenced contracting practices using a novel data set measuring the content and structure of 90 commission documents from the later thirteenth to the early sixteenth century. We find strong evidence that patrons used formal contracts to mitigate painter opportunism but little evidence that artists’ age-related reputation for honest dealing had a systematic effect on contracting practices.”
An interesting tidbit:
Patrons wrote significantly longer and more exhaustive contracts when awarding especially remunerative commissions. The content of these contracts similarly reflected patrons’ fear that more valuable commissions would increase painters’ benefits from shirking and indulging in excessive delegation…[W]e find that commission value increased the likelihood that patrons explicitly committed to enforcement by third parties. Finally, larger commission prices encouraged patrons to impose limits on delegation upon those painters most likely to employ other skilled artisans.
Most appropriately, a highly creative paper.
