3 - Price

Summary

Pricing in the arts is peculiar and opaque. Pricing for works of art is very different from pricing for museum tickets and other interchangeable goods. We consider price elasticity of demand, meaning customer sensitivity to a change in price, especially considering a ticket-pricing change at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. We consider price discrimination, the strategy of charging different prices to different groups of people. We consider other variations on pricing structure including bundling, two-part tariffs, and versioning. For pricing works of art, the method of pricing is, following from Velthuis’s work, largely sociological and best modeled as a set of scripts.