Buyer behaviour in a regional thoroughbred yearling market

This paper reports the results of an hedonic pricing analysis of a regional thoroughbred auction market, adding to a literature which has been built mainly on data from elite auction markets. The main contribution of the paper is the finding that the role of the dam in affecting yearling price, elusive in the existing literature, is shown to depend primarily on information about progeny performance rather than dam performance. Additional results confirm existing knowledge about the roles of the sire, yearling sex, and yearling age, and support suspicions that race horses are consumer rather than investment goods.