For decades, the idea that more education will lead to greater individual and national prosperity has been a cornerstone of developed economies. Challenging this conventional wisdom, 'The Global Auction' forces us to reconsider our deeply held and mistaken views about how the global economy really works and how to thrive in it.

For decades, the idea that more education will lead to greater individual and national prosperity has been a cornerstone of developed economies. Challenging this conventional wisdom, 'The Global Auction' forces us to reconsider our deeply held and mistaken views about how the global economy really works and how to thrive in it.

Chinese Contemporary Art in the Global Auction Market charts the rapid emergence of a multi-million-dollar global market for Chinese Contemporary art by revealing the strategic activities of art world agents in promoting the work of ‘avant-garde’ Chinese artists to a Western audience.

A trailblazing look at the historical emergence of a global field in contemporary art and the diverse ways artists become valued worldwide Prior to the 1980s, the postwar canon of “international” contemporary art was made up almost exclusively of artists from North America and Western Europe, while cultural agents from other parts of the world often found themselves on the margins. The Global Rules of Art examines how this discriminatory situation has changed in recent decades. Drawing from abundant sources—including objective indicators from more than one hundred countries, multiple institutional histories and discourses, extensive fieldwork, and interviews with artists, critics, curators, gallerists, and auction house agents—Larissa Buchholz examines the emergence of a world-spanning art field whose logics have increasingly become defined in global terms. Deftly blending comprehensive historical analyses with illuminating case studies, The Global Rules of Art breaks new ground in its exploration of valuation and how cultural hierarchies take shape in a global context. The book’s innovative global field approach will appeal to scholars in the sociology of art, cultural and economic sociology, interdisciplinary global studies, and anyone interested in the dynamics of global art and culture.

I study the coordination problem of a continuum of agents that compete in an auction on public debt subject to default. The auction is a global game where agents hold incomplete information about the fundamentals of the economy, namely the costs associated with default. I show that there exists a unique symmetric equilibrium, in contrast with the results obtained under complete information. I then add a costly policy choice on debt-financed public spending, made prior to the auction, to see whether the policy maker can affect the coordination outcome; it turns out that the public signal conveyed by the policy restores agents' ability to coordinate and therefore multiplicity of equilibria because intervention signals intermediate fundamentals. These equilibria are different from the complete information benchmark: there are sets of beliefs that sustain the unique symmetric equilibrium irrespectively of the policy choice, while others that entail equilibrium strategies such that bidders will bid high rates if and only if the policy fails to lower spending; the policy maker is then subject to self-fulfilling market expectations.