The motion-picture industry, with its global economic reach and high-stakes highly uncertain investments, transforms creative talent and inputs into multi-billion-dollar profits. The high-profile institutions, operations, exhibition patterns, distribution channels, and marketing strategies present opportunities to explore a wide range of economic research questions. Financial data, particularly on box-office and other revenue sources, provide researchers with a unique opportunity to gather extensive evidence and uncover empirical regularities that yield fundamental insights into strategic investment, organizational design, incentive-compatible contracting, product design, advertising, and cross-cultural consumer experiences, among other areas of basic economic research.This special issue comprises five papers that explore some of these areas, creatively exploiting publicly available data and well-documented industry institutions.The first paper presents evidence on financial outcomes for remakes, an alternative form of brand extension. The second paper studies sequel films in the

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The “free access” policy designed by the British Government has encouraged interest in museum financial issues. We define a principal-agent model for museum administration where there are two income sources: public grants and ticket revenues. This model allows us to define the optimal contract determining public grants, ticket prices, budget and managerial effort. We find a theoretical explanation for the inelastic pricing strategy commonly adopted in cultural economics. We further find that museum manager should never have any control over the price of tickets. The model can also be applied to other institutions, such as schools or NGOs, which are able to raise funds directly from private (e.g., ticket revenues or membership fees) or public sources. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, B.V. 2006Grants, Public valuation, Public prices, Museums, Principal-agent model,

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