Putting a Price on Simon Kuznets’s Nobel in Economics

James D. Watson’s sold for $4.76 million while the one owned by William Randal Cremer, a member of Parliament and labor activist, fetched just $17,000.

Now another Nobel medal — this one awarded to the economist Simon Kuznets in 1971 — is on the auction block. The unusual sale presents an intriguing, if not quite Nobel-worthy, economic puzzle: How do you set the price of an item with barely any market history?

After all, only a handful of the 889 medals awarded since 1901 have ever been sold. And none of them were for economic sciences, a stepchild, since the category was belatedly endowed by the Bank of Sweden in 1968 in honor of its 300th anniversary. The original five prizes established in Alfred Nobel’s will included the peace prize, which Cremer won in 1903, and medicine, which Dr. Watson took home in 1962 for his co-discovery with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins of the structure of DNA.

Pricing is “both an art and science,” said Laura Yntema, auction manager at Nate D. Sanders Auctions in California, which is handling the online bidding, scheduled to end on Thursday at 8 p.m. Eastern time. In other words, you consult the sale history and then you consult your gut.

For the Kuznets sale, the Nate Sanders auction house is hoping to attract universities that have a connection to the economist, collectors and perhaps a Wall Street mogul or two.

Ms. Yntema of the auction house said the opening bid ideally should be set a little below what you think the item will actually sell for, but in the end, as any economist can tell you, the fair market value is what someone is actually willing to pay.

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