On justifying the different claims to academic freedom

Conclusion Academic freedom is thus a complex ideal, and I have argued that in many respects it has a more limited application than some of its protagonists seem to believe. Many of the arguments for it, moreover, are not peculiar to academics and universities. We would therefore be well advised to take seriously Eric James' injunction to think less of universities as having rights to additional and peculiar liberties, and to regard them more as places where the essential liberties of a civilised state find strongest champions, champions, moreover, who by reason of the intellectual strength which they possess, and the intellectual integrity which they defend, have a particular responsibility.³⁶ But it is beyond rational doubt that the continuation of civilised states as civilised depends on the maintenance of, among other things, academic freedom, and particularly of what I have called scholarly freedom.     

The “manifest destiny” of the performing arts

Journal of Cultural Economics -     

Politico-economic interactions of German public performing arts institutions

Our paper analyzes the conduct of German public performing arts institutions in terms of non-market decision making or public choice. Apart from consumers of performing arts managers of performing arts institutions and public donors are main agents. A manager of a performing arts institution will not assume that the number of visitors is independent of his institution's programme or the ticket prices. By the same reasoning he will regard the amount of public subsidies not as exogenous, but dependent on his own policy. If future grants depend on present and past success (however defined), this will feed back into managerial decisions, along with expectations about demand. Data for the Federal Republic of Germany serve to empirically support the theoretical argument.     

Revenue and attendance simultaneous optimization in performing arts organizations

Performing arts organizations are characterized by different objectives other than revenue. Even if, on the one hand, theaters aim to increase revenue from box office as a consequence of the systematic reduction in public funds; on the other hand, they pursue the objective to increase its attendance. A common practice by theaters is to provide incentives to customers to discriminate among themselves according to their reservation price, offering a schedule of different prices corresponding to different seats in the venue. In this context, price and allocation of the theater seating area is decision variables that allow theater managers to manage their two conflicting goals to be pursued. In this paper, we introduce a multi-objective optimization model that jointly considers pricing and seat allocation. The framework proposed integrates a choice model estimated by multinomial logit model and the demand forecast, taking into account the impact of heterogeneity among customer categories in both choice and demand. The proposed model is validated with booking data referring to the Royal Danish theater during the period 2010–2015.     

Evidence of the existence of the cost disease in the performing arts

This paper examines the experience of 25 large U.S. orchestras over a 21-year period for the presence or absence of the cost disease. Appropriate measures of input and output are discussed. Measures of productivity, compensation per worker, and unit labor costs are calculated and compared to similar measures for the manufacturing sector. The history of ticket prices and attendance is reviewed, and price and income elasticities of demand are estimated. The relationship between all these variables is explored, and some policy recommendations are offered.The author is grateful to Professor William Baumol and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments. She also wishes to thank Heather Dinwiddie and Dan Patterson of the American Symphony Orchestra League for making the orchestra data available. Support for this project was provided by a grant-in-aid of research from Indiana University Southeast.     

The “manifest destiny” of the performing arts by A. Peacock

Journal of Cultural Economics -