What is a gift’s true price? By analyzing thousands of paintings given as gifts, I put a number on the social value of art. I uncover a gift discount due to yingchou, social obligation, but also an important premium for elite past owners. When the gift economy meets the market economy, personal sentiments become fragile.
Everybody gives and receives gifts. “It’s the thought that counts,” people often say. But what is that thought worth? Does an object’s value transform when it passes from the giver to the recipient? Does the giver’s, and / or the receiver’s identity, become part of the gift? And do gifts really (not) come with a price?
Artists, like us, give and receive gifts. In fact, some of the world’s most celebrated masterpieces began not as commissions for patrons, but as personal tokens—painted for friends, for lovers, for memorable moments. Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers, for instance, were created for his friend Paul Gauguin as an expression of gratitude, in anticipation of his friend’s arrival at the Yellow House in Arles.
From personal offerings to world-renowned paintings, what changes when art is a gift? Is it imbued with a richer essence—emotion, authenticity, personalization—devoid of market intentions? Or does the shadow of obligation and personal history remain with it, altering its destiny forever?
Why this study?
Today, art has become an increasingly popular financial asset, but a notoriously volatile one. Scholars argue that this is because art has a distinctive, dual nature: it is both an investment and a consumption good, meant to be experienced and appreciated. The emotional side of art is often disregarded in economic analysis, yet it is fundamental.
This is why gift art is a perfect lens for our study. Created for consumption (to nurture relationships), not for sale, these works embody social value rather than economic value. By following their trajectory into the marketplace, we can observe: how does sentimental value translate into prices?
What is this about?
A gift is often offered without a price tag, but this does not mean a gift is without value. Gift giving often entails obligation and reciprocity, a social glue that persists even in our market economy, offering intrinsic benefits of personal and social interaction that pure market commerce cannot.
I turned to a context where gift-giving has special cultural meaning: China. Here, gift-giving is a long-standing tradition which cultivates guanxi, the prevalent system of social networks governed by sentiment and reciprocity. I focused on Zhang Daqian (1899-1983), a monumental figure in 20th-century Chinese art, often called “the Picasso of the East.” Zhang was a legendary socialite who loved making and gifting art to friends, who once said, “What is so valuable about money? What is most valuable is friendship and friends!” The market indicates that it may well be the case. According to Christie’s, “The works he gifted are especially valuable,” with pieces like his gift painting Autumn Dawn (1978) fetching over $30 million.
I explored three questions, which simply put, are:
- Are gift artworks cheaper or more expensive than non-gift artworks?
- Do the identities of previous owners impact a gift artwork’s value?
- Do gift artworks command higher prices due to an owner’s emotional attachment (the “endowment effect”)?
How did I look at it?
To answer these questions, I used hedonic regression, a method that breaks an artwork’s price into the implicit value of its characteristics—size, material, subject matter, and, crucially for us, its gift status.
Chinese art by itself offers rich information thanks to the long tradition in inscriptions. Creation records, connoisseurial comments, and artist signatures make it easier for us to understand artworks from the past. Here, I relied on shangxia kuan, a specific form of signature including the names of both the artist and the recipient, to identify gift artworks. By reading inscriptions, I also built lists of keywords including words of respect and honorific titles, revealing why and to whom the artist gave each gift.
From a dataset of 9,953 of Zhang Daqian’s body of works auctioned globally (1994-2022), I found 3,128 gift works, which make up for 31.4%. These gifts reveal a vast social network, involving 2,332 different recipients across 19 identity categories, ranging from common people to social elites.
What did I find out?
- The gift discount. Do gift artworks indeed fetch higher prices? Counterintuitively, no. On average, gift artworks actually sell for about 3.22% less than his non-gift works. This gift discount may reflect a persistent belief: that art made in response to social obligation (yingchou) is of lesser quality. To later buyers, a heartfelt dedication to someone else can feel like a historical footnote, with a taint of social debt—much like Western portraiture paintings, which typically have limited market appeal beyond the sitter’s family.
- The power of provenance. While the gift status itself carries a discount, the recipient’s identity matters. Artworks gifted to people from political, business, and noble circles see a significant price premium. This may be suggesting a halo effect where the high social statuses of recipients give a boost to the value of a gift artwork, but it may also be revealing potential buyers’ identities which are largely unknown, as individuals tend to identify with people who affirm their own identities.
- The missing endowment effect. The universal “endowment effect”—where owners value something more simply because they own it—seems to disappear when it comes to gift artworks. This may be attributed to the fact that, once an owner decides to sell, the gift is then given up as intended, and thus not treated as a loss of a personal souvenir.
The take-home message.
The message of the study is not that gifts are “cheaper”; it’s that even with gifts, they come with a price. It reveals that the market logic exists within a much larger, richer human system. A vast ecosystem of relationships—of regard, favor, and guanxi—functions alongside and often above mere monetary exchange.
For us, it’s a reminder that our most meaningful transactions are often un-priced. For art investors, it’s a note to look beyond the returns to the art itself, as histories of artworks make a fundamental difference to their value. For policy makers, it highlights the complex, non-monetary economies that underpin market economies.
About the article
Song, Y. The art of the gift: provenance and the endowment effect in Chinese gift artworks. J Cult Econ (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-025-09565-x
About the author
Yuqing Song is a doctoral candidate at Université libre de Bruxelles.
About the image
Still Life – Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers, 1888 – Vincent van Gogh – WikiArt.org. Sunflowers (1888), Vincent van Gogh, via Wikimedia Commons.
