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.
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