Dealer-Dealer Pricing in the Mid Seventeenth-Century Antwerp to Paris Art Trade

We explore here the logic of an evolution in pricing regimes within an ongoing agency relationship. The logic is that of costs — information, negotiation and monitoring costs. The potential of such costs to account for organisational and contractual choice has been recognised by Cheung (1987), though our investigation is the first we know of to apply this logic to an actual evolutionary sequence of pricing arrangements.