Do Transaction Prices Reflect Visual Preference? A Diagnostic Study with Multimodal Language Models

Abstract

Existing visual preference evaluation relies on costly human annotations or preference reward models, whereas online marketplace transaction prices are readily available and reflect real purchasing behavior, offering potential low-cost supervision. However, transaction prices conflate visual preferences with non-visual factors such as provenance, demand, and competition, making aggregate accuracy insufficient to distinguish model errors, unreliable price signals, and protocol confounds. To address this identifiability challenge, we introduce MarketImage, a diagnostic framework that identifies when transaction prices reflect visual preferences, where they fail, and whether multimodal language models can recover human-supported visual preference signals. MarketImage comprises three components: (i) MarketImageArt, 266 six-image comparison sets with transaction prices and price-blind human rankings; (ii) MarketImageLens, a tie-preserving protocol that partitions 3,990 within-set image pairs into price-human agreement, conflict, and price-tie regions while separately auditing presentation-order effects; and (iii) MarketValuator, six elicitation methods spanning direct comparison, independent scoring, budget constraints, and multi-agent aggregation to evaluate signal recovery by static visual scorers and three multimodal language models. Experiments show that only 24.2% of image pairs have a non-tied price direction, of which 34.7% agree with the human majority. Within this region, HPSv2 leads at 66.4% Recoverable Accuracy; Qwen's budgeted and aggregated variants trail baselines, while GPT interface gains remain statistically unresolved. Thus, transaction prices encode recoverable visual preferences only under limited conditions and should be treated as uncertain proxies rather than ground truth.