Research · Working paper

The Missing Market for Creative Utility

The price signal is structurally wrong for the work that ends up mattering most.

Derek Morrison’s working paper on why the value creative work generates over time goes unpriced, what that does to the supply of the most valuable work, and what a market for it requires.

Paper record

Published: March 2026
SSRN: 6379120
ORCID: 0009-0000-8091-1813

Read on SSRN

Citation: Morrison, D. (2026). The Missing Market for Creative Utility. SSRN Working Paper 6379120.

Eight years from a question to a formal thesis

good idea. Do it!

Richard H. ThalerWinner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences21 March 2018

Screenshot of Richard H Thaler's reply on Twitter, 21/03/2018 at 22:18, replying to @DerekDecanted: good idea. Do it!

In 2018 Derek Morrison asked the Nobel Prize-winning economist Richard Thaler whether his idea of transaction utility could be extended to the value a purchase creates beyond the buyer. Thaler replied in four words.

The question became The Missing Market for Creative Utility. The market the paper says is missing became PNAQL.

What the price misses.

Every stream and every ticket sale records a consumption event and pays accordingly. Creative works do something else as well. A song shapes culture for decades, and a film becomes a reference point for generations. That value keeps compounding long after the transaction closes, while the creator’s share was settled at the moment of the click.

The paper calls this creative utility. The price signal is structurally wrong, and most wrong for the work that ends up mattering most. The result is a structurally missing market.

The price signal is structurally wrong, and most wrong for the work that ends up mattering most.

Four times the price was wrong.

Abstract economic claims become concrete when you look at real creative work. Each case isolates a different dimension of the missing market, and together they make the argument visible.

Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night: a swirling night sky over a village, a cypress in the foreground. — One painting soldVincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889. Public domain.

Case 1: The market said stop

Van Gogh · The Starry Night

By the usual account, Van Gogh sold one painting in his lifetime. His work now supports museum attendance, reproduction licensing and tourism around the world, and The Starry Night belongs to everyone’s shared vocabulary. The market’s later valuation of his work is a retrospective claim on production it played no part in enabling.

The work exists because his brother Theo provided a private stipend that stood in for the signal the market failed to send. The market said: this generates no return. Theo said: make it anyway. We observe Van Gogh because Theo existed. We cannot observe the painters of equal potential who received the same signal without a Theo, responded rationally, and became something else. The market shows us its survivors. It has no method for counting its casualties.

Banksy's mural on the West Bank barrier: two children with buckets and spades beneath a painted hole in the wall showing a beach. — Zero sale priceBanksy, West Bank barrier, 2005.

Case 2: No transaction, enormous value

Banksy · West Bank barrier, 2005

In 2005 Banksy painted nine images on the West Bank barrier. They were made illegally, with no sale and no possible sale. Their cultural value accumulated anyway: within days they had travelled the world, and they are still discussed twenty years later. The same artist’s canvases sell at the major auction houses, so the comparison isolates a single variable: whether a transaction was possible.

Remove the transaction entirely and the cultural value still compounds. The value is generated independently of the sale. The sale is simply the only moment the current system has any way to capture it.¹

Kate Bush lying back among swathes of purple fabric, her hair spread around her. — 37 yearsKate Bush, Hounds of Love sleeve, 1985.

Case 3: 37 years of compounding, priced in a day

Kate Bush · Running Up That Hill

Running Up That Hill reached number three in the UK in 1985, then entered decades of cultural dormancy: present in the shared vocabulary of a generation and accumulating meaning, while earning little. When the Stranger Things team licensed it in 2022, they chose it for that accumulated cultural weight.

The licence was priced against the song’s commercial record: a catalogue track with modest streaming figures. The song went to number one in the UK in 2022 and was streamed at enormous scale, all paid at standard per-play rates. Nothing in the price could reflect that the demand existed because of 37 years of cultural accumulation.²

Taylor Swift on stage in a jewelled bodysuit, one arm raised, against a dark backdrop of lights. — Same songs, same artistTaylor Swift in concert.

Case 4: Value stays with the creator

Taylor Swift · The re-recordings

When Taylor Swift re-recorded her first six albums, audiences moved at scale to Taylor’s Version, and sync licensing followed them. The original masters, sold in 2019, lost cultural relevance against the re-recordings.

A sale of masters transfers the recording. The relationship between the artist and her audience, the meaning and the sense of who owns the story, stayed with the artist, and the value followed her. The cultural value that makes creative IP worth acquiring does not always transfer with the IP.³

Florence from the hills above the city: the cathedral dome, bell towers and the river under a clouded sky.

We go to Tuscany for the art and the architecture. Nobody goes to look at the Medici bank statements.

The cultural value created by centuries of creative work in Tuscany has compounded into tourism and property worth orders of magnitude more than any original transaction captured. Each creator was paid what the market could see at the point of sale. The value that accumulated afterwards had no instrument. The paper’s three pillars establish why that gap exists and why it widens.

Why the market is broken.

The latent market
The value exists. It has no instrument.
Global tourism generates around $9 trillion a year, and the paper estimates that around $2.7 trillion of that is culturally motivated.⁴ The global recorded music industry generates around $19 billion.⁵ Culture drives economic activity in travel and property, and in every industry that profits from a cultural atmosphere it did not create. A missing market is one that would clear if it could form. This one cannot form under the current payment architecture.
Attribution failure
The payment happens once. The value compounds for decades.
Payment systems treat the transaction as final. The creator’s economic claim closes at the moment of sale, before the cultural value has begun to compound. No information available at that point can price what does not yet exist. No single creator, label or platform can change the arrangement alone, so the market cannot assemble itself from within the system it would replace.
Structural depletion
A market that drives out its best work.
Creative economies face a version of the same problem with a harder edge: the quality is often plain to see, and the market has no way to pay for it. Creators facing that signal adapt. The makers of the most durable work leave first. Those who stay shift toward what can be measured quickly. The generation that follows develops its craft under those conditions and never acquires what a corrected market would value. Creative capability lost to a bad signal does not come back quickly.

In 1970 George Akerlof showed how a market can drive out its own best goods.

George A. AkerlofWinner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences

Output rises while the culture thins.

As the wrong price signal persists across generations, output volume rises while the cultural value of that output falls. The market reads rising output as a sign of health. The paper reads it differently.

The chart shows three lines: output volume, creative inheritance, and the rate at which cultural value is created each period. The tipping point is where rising output can no longer make up for depleted inheritance.

Think of the creative inheritance as a sourdough starter. Each generation draws from what came before and feeds a richer culture forward. When the market stops signalling that slow, original work is worth making, the starter weakens. Output still rises, and the culture in each loaf is thinner.

Hover or tap a line or a key to read what it measures.

The rate at which cultural value is created peaks, then falls, as rising output draws on a depleted inheritance. The cumulative stock keeps rising. What falls is the rate at which it grows. Illustrative, after Morrison (2026).

Why slow-burn work is abandoned before it is recognised.

Four kinds of creative work plotted across generational time. Slow-burn work sits near zero through the risk window, when its makers receive no signal and decide whether to continue. By the time recognition arrives, much of that capability is already gone. Van Gogh’s trajectory is the purple line.

Hover or tap a line or a kind of work to highlight it.

How easily work is copied, against its market price at the point of sale

Slow-burn

Hard to copy, low market price. Van Gogh, Kafka, Melville, Leonard Cohen.

The market underprices these works at launch, while their cultural value over time is the highest of all. This is where the missing market does the most damage, because capability lost here does not come back.

Sustained premium

Hard to copy, high market price. Gehry, Rothko, Sondheim, haute couture.

Pricing is strong and the work endures, though its full cultural value still exceeds what the original transaction captured.

Formats and filler

Easy to copy, low market price. Format commodities.

Little lasting cultural value. They saturate quickly and can crowd out attention from higher-quality work.

Viral

Easy to copy, high market price. Gangnam Style, viral formats.

A strong signal at launch that decays relatively quickly. The market reads these well in the short term, and platforms tend to optimise toward them.

What it means for capital

Capital as patient as culture.

Everyone who pays for creative work today works to a short horizon. A licence is priced off recent streams, and a fund buying catalogue rights prices them on recent earnings. The most valuable creative work is the work whose value takes longest to arrive, so it is the work this market prices worst.

For an investor, that is the opportunity the paper describes. Creative rights are long-lived assets priced off short-run data. Capital that can hold a work’s income over decades, and see that income clearly as it accrues, sits exactly where today’s market is weakest. Holding it that way needs the instruments and the infrastructure that PNAQL builds.

For investors For rights holders

For the artist and regional view of the same research, visit creativewealthglobal.org.

Read the paper

Morrison, D. (2026). The Missing Market for Creative Utility. SSRN Working Paper 6379120. Published March 2026.

Read on SSRN Author ORCID

Notes

Morrison (2026), street art case. ↩
Morrison (2026), Kate Bush case. ↩
Morrison (2026), re-recording case. ↩
Morrison (2026), section 2.4 and Appendix C. ↩
Morrison (2026), section 4.8. ↩