Your Network, Not Your Talent: New Evidence on How Markets Allocate Opportunity
A new study published in Nature Communications, co-authored by LSB’s Professor Magnus Resch, offers a rare, large-scale look at how gatekeeping institutions shape who succeeds in a creative market — using the global contemporary art world as its testing ground.
Drawing on the exhibition and auction histories of 65,768 artists across 20,389 institutions, the researchers first confirm a familiar pattern: women represent 36.5% of active artists but receive markedly fewer exhibition opportunities and are far less likely to ever reach the secondary auction market. By the time work reaches auction, men’s total sales value runs 7.5 times higher than women’s.
The more novel contribution is methodological. By modeling auction access as a function of an artist’s career profile alongside the gender composition of the institutions that exhibited them, the authors show that an artist’s “co-exhibition gender” — essentially, which network they belong to — is a stronger predictor of market access than their own gender. Two equally accomplished artists, in other words, can end up on very different career trajectories depending purely on the reputational network they enter early on.
The study also maps how this plays out structurally: prestige and gender imbalance are correlated — the most prestigious institutions are the most male-dominated — and institutions cluster along gender lines in ways that make it difficult for artists to cross from one network into another later in their careers.
For researchers and students of markets, organizations, and network economics, the paper offers a concrete, quantified case study of how structural position — not individual merit alone — can determine who gets access to opportunity, prestige, and financial reward.
Magnus Resch is a Professor of Management at LSB. He also lectures at Yale University. His research has been published in Science and Nature Comms. He’s also the founder of magnus.net, the Shazam for Art.
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