Abstract
Some recent empirical contributions have highlighted that tourists often go to museums yet appear to extract little utility from the experience. We argue that this is often the case with agents who visit museums only while on holiday and results from a temporary lack of substitute experience goods or compliance with a must-do list. If such agents behaved according to Stigler and Becker’s rational addiction theory, they would also visit museums while at home. However, most do not, which makes them constantly occasional consumers. We indirectly test for the presence of constantly occasional museum attendance by tourists, using data from a survey conducted in 2012 at Vittoriale, the most popular museum at Lake Garda, a renowned Italian tourist destination. By applying multiple correspondence analysis to a question on motivations to visit the museum, we obtain two dimensions of motivation: one based on a search for knowledge and the other based on a more recreational attitude. Identification of the latter is a new finding in itself. We include these dimensions as regressors in a model used to explain museum attendance. We find, as expected, that light consumption negatively affects attendance. We therefore argue that empirical analyses of museum attendance should not disregard light motivation as a possible driver.
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Notes
These three papers explicitly include motivation as a covariate. They are part of a wider literature investigating repeat attendance at cultural events—among others, see Collins et al. (2008).
The heterogeneity of motivations for cultural participation has also been highlighted by some contributions of marketing scholars (Caldwell and Woodside 2003) and sociologists (Rössl 2011). These contributions highlight that issues such as sociality, relaxation and emotion may play an important role in shaping attitudes towards cultural services. As these are dimensions not necessarily related to cultural capital, these studies add to the evidence against the idea of cultural participation as mainly driven by the latter, as interpreted by Stigler and Becker (1977) or Bourdieu (1984).
This may, however, be specific to the US context; elsewhere, and especially in Italy, museums are also often present in small towns.
When distinguishing between different types of art exhibitions, they even find a significantly negative coefficient in the case of ancient art.
Cellini (2011) illustrates similar findings with regard to the question of whether an inscription on the UNESCO list affects tourism attractiveness. Sound econometric analysis refutes the existence, at the international level, of a causal relationship between cultural attractions and tourism flows, in contrast to previous evidence.
However, this shortcoming is mitigated by the possibility afforded respondents of providing multiple answers. Notice that in both contributions, the sample consisted of tourists and local visitors in almost equal proportions.
As a caveat, one must warn that in analyses of museum visits, there might be a confounding effect of multiple visits by the same people, as reported by Towse (2014), which might partially alter the interpretation of the results.
Travel costs are not considered for the obvious reason that we are not considering the frequency of museum attendance with respect to a single museum, so there is no way to derive them. Entrance price is not considered, either, both because of lack of data and in light of arguments in Seaman (2006), who observes that the estimated coefficient for entrance price is not a reliable measure of price elasticity.
We agree with an anonymous referee that the number of books is an imperfect measure of reading and hence literacy (although books encompass a quite wide range of publications, not just novels). In fact, there is a wider class of publications one could consider, and books are not all of the same length and reading level. Nevertheless, we suspect that reading theatrical reviews, high-quality magazines, etc., is highly correlated with reading books. As for the variance in book length, the publishing industry tends to impose some standardisation on numbers of words, due to costs and marketing strategies.
In Italy, there are no data on the geographic dispersion of private firms’ cultural sponsorships, but firms are concentrated in the North, which is rich relative to other regions and of greater interest as a market for firms. Additionally, banking foundations, which came into existence after public banks were privatised in 1992 and are by far the most prominent private spenders on culture, are mainly concentrated in the North, and their statutes allow them to spend almost exclusively in the communities in which they are located.
Vittoriale is rated 4.5 out of 5 by Tripadvisor (600 reviews in Feb. 2014).
There is also, within the premises, an open air theatre that hosts a renowned festival of high-quality pop and jazz concerts every summer. The survey, however, was conducted exclusively with visitors to the museum.
Foreign tourists are a small percentage of overall visitors. Italians are more familiar, thanks to school programmes, with D’Annunzio’s personality. School trips to Vittoriale, which account for a high percentage of visits in the wintertime, do not occur in the summertime.
The museum is located at the border between North-West and North-East Italy. The survey was of all visitors, both Italian and foreign, but the number of foreigners who answered was so negligible that we exclude them from the analysis.
As some outliers emerged, though it was a negligible number, values above 25 visits per year (i.e., more than two per month) were replaced by the median value (i.e., 27).
Some respondents who had visited one or two museums in the last 12 months had visited none in the previous year (35.48 %), and very few had visited more than two (12.9 %).
This is in line with Prentice et al. (1998), in which the most discriminatory motivation in the segmentation of visitors through cluster analysis is “family or social outing”, which creates two clusters that on their own account for 40 % of the sample.
We consider the number of income earners as a proxy for the inverse of the dependency ratio at the family level; the pure income effect is controlled for by the high income regressor.
Age squared was never significant when introduced as an extra regressor, revealing a linear relationship between age and museum attendance.
We decided to include these two covariates in the model of Table 3 for the sake of comparability with previous contributions as they are standard determinants. However, because of their insignificance, they can be dropped without significantly altering the results. This increases the degrees of freedom and thus the power of the significance tests.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the Autonomous Province of Bolzano project, “Le attrazioni culturali e naturali come motore dello sviluppo turistico. Un’analisi del loro impatto economico, sociale e culturale”, Research Funds, 2009. This paper was presented to: 18th International Conference of the ACEI, UQAM, Montreal, Canada, June 24–27, 2014; 55th scientific meeting of the Italian Society of Economists, Trento, Italy, October 23–25, 2014; 2014 Barcelona Workshop on Regional and Urban Economics: Cultural Tourism and Sustainable Urban Development, AQR-IREA, University of Barcelona, Spain, November 27–28, 2014. We thank all conference attendees, who provided very helpful comments. We thank the Chair of the Vittoriale degli Italiani Foundation, Giordano Bruno Guerri, and Giovanna Ciccarelli, director of the educational department of the Vittoriale museum, for their co-operation in conducting the survey. We also thank Giorgio Tagliapini for excellent research assistance.
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Brida, J.G., Dalle Nogare, C. & Scuderi, R. Frequency of museum attendance: motivation matters. J Cult Econ 40, 261–283 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-015-9254-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-015-9254-5