Information extraction and artwork pricing

Traditional art pricing models often lack fine measurements of painting content. This paper proposes a new content measurement: the Shannon information quantity measured by the singular value decomposition (SVD) entropy of the painting image. Using a large sample of artworks' auction records and images, we show that the SVD entropy positively affects the sales price at 1% significance level. Compared to the other commonly adopted content variables, the SVD entropy has advantages in variable sign...