production
white river
About

Quantitative infrastructure for the art market.

We apply the analytical rigor expected of public-market research to the art market — without the opacity, bespoke fees, or implied advisory relationship of traditional art-market consultancies.

Mission

What we do

We aggregate publicly disclosed auction records from the world's primary auction houses, normalize them into a research-grade panel, and run a cascade of econometric and probabilistic models to produce per-artist price indices, risk metrics, comparables, and forward forecasts. The flagship product is a probabilistic auction guarantee pricing model: given a lot, what guarantee maximizes expected house P&L while keeping P(loss) below an underwriter-chosen ceiling.

Audience

Who it is for

Auction houses & underwriters
Guarantee pricing, expected-value scoring of upcoming lots, ensemble forecasts that incorporate Hawkes intensity, MDN drift, and Bayesian level shifts.
Lenders & insurers
Per-artist liquidity tiers, drawdown statistics, value-at-risk outputs explicitly labeled with their normality assumption.
Allocators, advisors & private collectors
Portfolio benchmarking against asset-class indices, concentration and correlation analysis, comparable-artist screens.
Researchers
A public API and a research lab that exposes seventeen quantitative models with diagnostics, calibration plots, and a reproducible Python pipeline.
Team

Who builds it

A small team. Methods on one side, infrastructure on the other.

Founder
Ethan Brown
University of Michigan
ethan@whiteriverresearchgroup.com

Builds the platform's quantitative methods, data pipelines, modeling infrastructure, frontend, and public API. Every model, migration, and methodology section on this site to date is his work.

Limitations

What we are not

White River is not a registered investment advisor, art advisory firm, or appraiser. Outputs are model estimates intended to inform professional judgment, not replace it. See our methodology page for the full caveats and validation discipline behind every number on this site.

About — White River — White River Research