Abstract
While there is a fair amount of work on determinants of demand for the live performing arts, results have often been contradictory with little explanatory power. This may be because of the difficulty in describing the attributes of a performance, particularly in terms of its quality, and the heterogeneity of consumer preferences. This article uses conjoint analysis, also called choice experiments, to investigate the impact of the attributes of live theatre performances on demand, using data collected from 483 randomly chosen attenders at live theatre performances at the 2008 South African National Arts Festival. Attributes include the type of cast (professional, semi-professional or amateur), reputation of the producer/director, the context or setting, production type and ticket price of the show. Results largely support the a priori expectations based on the results of other demand studies. For example, it is found that the age of consumers affects the type of show chosen, that utility and willingness to pay increase for shows with professional and semi-professional casts and that 93% of the potential audience prefer shows with a South African context. It is concluded that the method could prove useful to both event organisers and policy makers, especially where the goal is to broaden access to the arts.
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Notes
An orthogonal and balance main-effects design must be as large or larger than a saturated design, and the number of alternatives should be divisible by the number of levels of all factors and by the products of the number of levels of all pairs of factors. Designs of less than 72 choice alternatives therefore incur violations, in a design which has factors with 2, 3, and 6 levels.
D-efficiency is a measure of the goodness-of-fit of the experimental design, based on the information matrix X′X.
A copy of the questionnaire is available from the authors on request.
The log-likelihood function, Akaike Information Criterion (AIC), are all goodness-of-fit measures or model summary statistics, based upon maximum likelihood estimation (see Verbeek 2000).
Where one US $ costs about 10 South African Rands and one Euro costs about 12 South African Rands.
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Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge research funding for this study from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Arts Council England (ACE), under their Fellowship on the economic impact of arts and humanities. The authors also wish to thank the National Arts Festival of South Africa for permitting visitor surveys to be undertaken at its venues during the 2008 National Arts Festival in Grahamstown.
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Willis, K.G., Snowball, J.D. Investigating how the attributes of live theatre productions influence consumption choices using conjoint analysis: the example of the National Arts Festival, South Africa. J Cult Econ 33, 167–183 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-009-9097-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-009-9097-z