Racial discrimination in non-fungible token (NFT) prices? CryptoPunk sales and skin tone

Can We Price Beauty? Aesthetics and Digital Art Markets

“…Table 2 summarizes the estimation results for the three hedonic pricing models under study. In line with previous studies in the Cryp-toPunks market (e.g., Nguyen, 2022), we observe high R 2 's due to the large effect of the month-year dummies with the models capturing around 92 % of the variation in logarithmic prices. All considered aesthetic measures have a statistically and economically significant price effect.…”

“…Our results extend previous studies that explore the relation between CryptoPunk prices and various characteristics of the underlying portaits, such as gender (Schaar and Kampakis, 2022), skin tone (Nguyen, 2022) and rarity (Dobrynskaya and Bianchi, 2023). Our paper is also related to the work of Borri et al (2023) that extracts visual characteristics from several NFT collections using neural networks and finds that they can partly explain prices.…”

“…To study the impact of aesthetics on NFT prices, we employ a hedonic regression analysis as is common in the traditional and digital art pricing literatures (e.g. Stepanova, 2019;Garay et al, 2022;Nguyen, 2022;Schaar and Kampakis, 2022). 2 Our model can be expressed as:…”

“…In contrast to traditional art that is typically sold via auctions, NFT-based digital art is traded in organized online marketplaces that are characterized by higher liquidity, continuous operation and easy access to creators and collectors. These distinct features of digital art have generated substantial interest from investors, while a new strand of economic research has been developing around understanding the determinants of NFT art prices (e.g., Horky et al, 2022;Schaar and Kampakis, 2022;Nguyen, 2022). We contribute to the literature by studying the relation between the visual attractiveness of digital art and its market price.…”

mercato dei non fungible tokens tra arte, moda e gamification

“…Va poi aggiunto che gli NFTs, a causa della loro unicità, che può essere letta anche in termini di scarsità e rarità (Mekacher, Bracci, Nadini, Martino, Alessandretti, Aiello, Baronchelli 2022), rappresentano una interessante sfida in termini di gestione identitaria e sociale (spinta alla differenziazione vs spinta all'omologazione), introducendo allo stesso tempo uno dei principali elementi trainanti il mercato.…”