Nudging museums attendance: a field experiment with high school teens

Abstract

This paper reports results from a field experiment conducted to study the effect of incentives offered to high school teens to motivate them to visit art museums. A vast literature exists on the design of incentives to modify the behavior of firms and consumers, but not much is known about incentives offered to adolescents and young adults to affect their cultural consumption behavior. Students in the first treatment receive a flier with basic information and opening hours of a main museum in Florence, Italy -Palazzo Vecchio. Students in the second treatment receive the flier and a short presentation conducted by an art expert about the exhibit; students in the third treatment, in addition to the flier and the presentation, receive also a non-financial reward in the form of extra-credit points towards their school grade. The analysis yields two main findings. First, non-financial reward is more effective at inducing the students to undertake the encouraged visit than either the simple presentation or the basic information with the flier. Second, over a longer time horizon the non-financial reward does not induce a significant change in behavior with respect to the simple presentation. JEL Classifications: M52, D82, C93, I28, Z10, Z18

What makes a museum attractive to young people? Evidence from Italy

“…The museums' ability to attract a young audience is drawing the increasing attention of both the scientific and the professional literatures (Lattarulo, Mariani, & Razzolini, ). However, to the authors' knowledge, still little is known about the factors that are more likely to affect young people willingness to visit a museum.…”

Exploring Encouragement, Treatment, and Spillover Effects Using Principal Stratification, With Application to a Field Experiment on Teens’ Museum Attendance

“…This is a novel territory for field experiments. Apart from Lattarulo et al (2016), whose results we revisit, and Kisida et al (2014), there is no other similar study in this area of empirical research. Three types of incentives were used, as students received three forms of encour-agement.…”

“…As described in Lattarulo et al (2016), the Palazzo Vecchio field experiment was run in Florence, Italy, at three different points in time during 2014. It involved 266 students from 15 different classes and from three different high schools 1 .…”

“…We analyze the effects of the three incentives on later museum visits. Future visits to museums may be induced directly by the form of encouragement received, which may directly stimulate personal motivation toward museum attendance (Lattarulo et al, 2016), or indirectly from the fact that the teenagers who carried out the visit to the proposed museum had a satisfactory experience that they try to repeat somewhere else (Kisida et al, 2014).…”

How free admittance affects charged visits to museums: an analysis of the Italian case

“…We mentionBrida et al (2016) andLattarulo et al (2017) as examples of studies concerning the motivation of visitors to Italian museums.…”