Some recent empirical contributions have highlighted that tourists often\ud go to museums yet appear to extract little utility from the experience. We argue that\ud this is often the case with agents who visit museums only while on holiday and\ud results from a temporary lack of substitute experience goods or compliance with a\ud must-do list. If such agents behaved according to Stigler and Becker’s rational\ud addiction theory, they would also visit museums while at home. However, most do\ud not, which makes them constantly occasional consumers. We indirectly test for the\ud presence of constantly occasional museum attendance by tourists, using data from a\ud survey conducted in 2012 at Vittoriale, the most popular museum at Lake Garda, a\ud renowned Italian tourist destination. By applying multiple correspondence analysis\ud to a question on motivations to visit the museum, we obtain two dimensions of\ud motivation: one based on a search for knowledge and the other based on a more\ud recreational attitude. Identification of the latter is a new finding in itself. We include\ud these dimensions as regressors in a model used to explain museum attendance. We\ud find, as expected, that light consumption negatively affects attendance. We therefore\ud argue that empirical analyses of museum attendance should not disregard light\ud motivation as a possible driver

This article provides an empirical investigation of the effects of the ownership and organizational structure on the performance of cultural institutions. More specifically, we consider how museums are effective in their function of disseminating culture to audiences and contributing to the local development. By exploiting a unique data set based on the 2011 census of Italian museums, we develop indexes of accessibility, visitors' experience, web visibility and promotion of the local cultural context. Using count data models, we regress such measures on the type of organization. We distinguish between governmental museums, public museums whose administration is either outsourced or has financial autonomy and private museums. We control for the most salient characteristics of a museum, competition pressure and some proxies of potential audience. Our evidence shows that private museums, public museums with financial autonomy and outsourced museums outperform public museums run as sub-units of culture departments. This paper contributes to the cultural economics, policy and public administration literature by adding insights into the effect of outsourcing and administrative decentralization in the public cultural sector.

Destination cards are popular means to promote attractions, events, and consumption.This research aims to investigate tourists' preferences by identifying the most common sequences of activities recorded by a destination card. We use pattern recognition and cluster analysis techniques. Evidence shows that most tourists prioritize outdoors moderately engaging activities, that there is a love for variety, and that cultural tourists are the only relevant group characterized by choosing activities belonging to the same type (indoors-intellectual engagement) along the engagement-leisure scale.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

This article addresses the evolution of modes of public support of cultural production by discussing and analysing the emerging phenomenon of outsourcing of public cultural services taking place in Continental Europe, especially Italy. We argue that in this context, which is traditionally characterised by the public production of cultural services, the current outsourcing trend is changing the very nature of public intervention in the market for cultural goods and services. This change leads to the recognition and definition of a new category of public intervention in the cultural field: direct support through production delegation. Its main and distinctive feature is a combination of institutional arrangements aimed at reducing public spending inefficiency while preserving government determination of cultural policy guidelines. Increased uncertainty about economic conditions, such as the prospective cost reductions associated with outsourcing, future economic cycles and cultural consumer preferences, may also help explain the selection of this institutional arrangement.

The recent narrative on museums as catalysts of innovation and growth considers their relations with other cultural and creative industries (CCIs) to be very important. We argue that most relations museums establish with CCI firms and institutions are unlikely to produce strong positive externalities that make the latter more innovative. To prove this claim, we propose a conceptual framework qualifying project-based and supply chain relations between museums and CCIs as either strong, moderate, or weak links, according to their potential in terms of knowledge spillovers from museums to CCIs. We apply this taxonomy to data collected from 261 Polish museums. Our findings indicate that strong links are outnumbered by moderate and weak ones. We then suggest that the traditional missions of museums, in particular education and conservation, need to be more thoroughly assessed in terms of their direct and indirect contributions in order to fully capture the impact of museums on innovation in the wider economy.