The political economy of cultural spending: evidence from Italian cities

We investigate the relationship between Italian municipalities’ spending on culture in the 1990s and 2000s and a number of political variables—such as a left/right dummy, an election-year dummy and a term-limit indicator—controlling, among other things, for economic and socio-demographic characteristics of the population, the level of human capital and instruction, proxies of social capital, the extent of private financing of cultural provisions and touristic and artistic relevance. We use a panel-data regression analysis and find that, indeed, some determinants of public expenditures on culture are political. In particular, we identify an electoral cycle in which the incumbent spends less on culture in an election year. This result is robust for variations in the empirical model accounting for both the persistence and spatial interdependence of cultural expenditures by municipalities.     

Purchasing power parity and cultural convergence: evidence from the global video games market

A shared activity or pursuit can have the effect of bringing about cultural convergence in the form of patterns of behaviour and consumption. This idea is supported by the Axelrod (1997) thesis, which suggests that cultures are more likely to interact and subsequently converge if they have shared traits: one of these being the use of technology. This paper seeks to apply such a cultural perspective to the body of published literature on deviations from the law of one price. Adopting a similar methodology to the popular ‘Big Mac’ index, disparity between official market exchange rate and the real rate of exchange between two currencies is measured using local prices of video game consoles. The results of the study suggest that, while a degree of pricing and cultural convergence across broad geographic areas is observed, many major global currencies are trading at levels that are quite significantly different to that which is suggested by purchasing power parity (PPP) theory.

Signaling for access to high-demand markets: evidence from the US motion picture industry

We develop a signaling model in which imperfectly competitive firms signal quality through expenditures in segmented markets. Separation in this model results in high-quality firms selling their products in a high-demand, and highly quality elastic, period. Low-quality firms sell their product in a low demand but less quality-sensitive period. A dataset including 1697 US theatrical releases between 1998 and 2008 is compiled and explored for evidence of this separating equilibrium. We find that our measures of signal intensity and realized quality (budgets and critical ratings, respectively) are both significantly greater during high-demand periods. Ticket sales are also shown to be more sensitive to expected quality as measured by budgets during the high-demand season. Other seasonal differences and implications are explored.     

Conceiving multiple markets through network analysis: evidence from the emergence of the World Music market

The idea of multiple markets, conceptualised as a variety of concrete market configurations, was fruitfully developed in the socio-material networks research programme. However, it has not yet been able to solve the following puzzle: the differentiation and specification of multiple markets that exist at the same time in the same place. In this paper, I argue that White’s model of ‘markets from networks’ can contribute to filling this gap, since it is centred on the specification of a market’s structural and cultural boundaries. His model allows for the analysis of concrete market practices intertwined with more abstract concepts of markets formed in discourses that move firms and markets across different levels – from local markets to market sectors. An in-depth analysis of the emergence of the World Music market demonstrates the advantages of employing this model in the analysis of multiple markets.     

Analyzing repeat consumption of identical cultural goods: some exploratory evidence from moviegoing

This study offers a preliminary exploration of repeat consumption of identical cultural goods, specifically moviegoing. The term ‘identical’ in this study refers to cases where, for example, individuals view the same film at a movie theater, in a short time interval, on more than one occasion i.e. experiencing the cultural good in precisely the same format. It is not meant to embrace the case of individuals who, for example, view a particular film at a movie theater and then see it some time later in another format, such as via a DVD player. The repeat viewing phenomenon is discussed and then considered empirically. Films aimed predominantly at children attract the highest number of repeat views, while those aimed at an older audience attract significantly fewer repeat views. The profile of repeat viewers of the 10 films which attracted the greatest number of repeat viewers was subject to more detailed scrutiny. In general, repeat viewers tend to be younger but the gender balance differs markedly according to film content. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 3rd European Workshop on Applied Cultural Economics, University of Oviedo in Aviles, Spain 14–16 June 2007 and the 9th International Conference on Arts and Cultural Management (AIMAC), Fundación Universidad Empresa (ADEIT), Valencia, Spain 8–11 July 2007. We are grateful for comments received and the usual caveat applies.     

Price and the person: markets,discrimination, and personhood

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how pricing has historically been involved in the making up of persons and how the ability to ‘personalize’ price is reconfiguring the ability of markets to discriminate. We discuss a variety of contemporary pricing practices, and three types of personhood they produce: generic, protected, and transcontextual. While some contemporary developments in pricing draw on understandings of the person that are quite familiar, others are novel and likely to be contested. We argue that many newer pricing techniques make it harder for consumers to identify themselves as part of a recognized group. We conclude that contemporary price personalization should be understood in terms of the intensification of individualization in combination with dividualization, and as such, contributes to novel and consequential forms of classification.     

Financial performativity as evidence of immanence: the phenomenology of liquidity crisis in contemporary markets for risk

The sociologist Bruno Latour has often expressed aversion to immanent critique, framing actor-network theory in terms of focus on visible phenomena. In spite of this, research on financial performativity inspired by Latour’s perspective can still be interpreted in terms of immanent critique and related to Political Economy (a critical discipline), through Kant’s critique of metaphysics as a ‘regulative axiom’. Research on financial performativity has uncovered evidence of the existence of constructive processes that show how an idea (like a financial model) can become something like an ‘object’. This ‘objectivity’ appears to contradict Kant’s critique of metaphysics – that there always remains a gap between our ideas and the world itself. This paper therefore explores financial performativity as a ‘contradiction’, historicizing it to argue that ‘Barnesian performativity’ and ‘financial liquidity’ are ‘immanent’ to one another in the events of recent financial crises. The paper conducts this interpretation to provide a new conceptualization of ‘financial liquidity’ that is more empirically apparent, helping to overcome some of the limits in the discussion of ‘liquidity’ in Political Economy (that Latour might want to highlight), where discussion occurs in metaphysical terms difficult to connect to actual events.     

Cultural goods creation, cultural capital formation, provision of cultural services and cultural atmosphere accumulation

The cultural atmosphere in a society is accumulated over time through the consumption of cultural services and is diminished through depreciation. Using cultural capital (e.g., cultural heritage, paintings, music scores), cultural services are provided by the cultural-services industry (e.g., museums, opera houses); cultural capital is enlarged by new cultural goods created by individuals. Individuals’ utilities are positively affected by the cultural services they consume, by the cultural goods they create and by the cultural atmosphere and the cultural capital accumulated in society. In a laissez-faire economy, individuals tend to ignore the positive external effects of their cultural-services consumption and creation of cultural goods on other individuals via accumulating cultural atmosphere and cultural capital. Consequently, suboptimally little cultural atmosphere and cultural capital will be accumulated. The efficient intertemporal allocation can be restored by introducing an appropriate subsidy that not only stimulates consumers’ demand for cultural services and the creation of new cultural goods but also enhances the accumulation of cultural atmosphere and cultural capital.

Regulating belonging: surveillance,inequality, and the cultural production of abjection

ABSTRACT

Conditions of abjection are increasingly viewed as problems to be managed with surveillance. Across disparate domains, bodies that challenge normalized constructions of responsible neoliberal citizenship are categorized, monitored, policed, and excluded in dehumanizing and often violent ways. This paper explores the role of surveillance in such processes. The registers covered include everyday abjection (welfare systems, battered women’s shelters, and homelessness), criminalized poverty (police targeting of the poor and emerging ‘poverty capitalism’ arrangements), and the radically adrift (the identification, tracking, and containment of refugees). In each of these cases, surveillance is yoked to structural inequalities and systems of oppression, but it also possesses a cultural dimension that thrusts marginalized and dehumanized subjectivities upon the abject Other. Therefore, I argue that in order to critique the gendered, racialized, and classed dimensions of contemporary surveillance, it is necessary to take seriously the mythologies that give meaning to surveillance practices and the subjectivities that are engendered by them.     

Cache society: transactional records,electronic money,and cultural resistance

Money is an ‘instrument of collective memory’ before it is a means of exchange, a unit of account or a store of value. Money's status as a memory technology is particularly significant in light of the role that information and communication technologies now play in economic transactions. Many of the new channels and infrastructures for payments, such as magnetic cards, mobile phones, the wired Internet, social media platforms, and RFID technologies, record detailed transactional data alongside a range of other identifying data. We now have extremely detailed records of the many ways that money circulates, is transferred and is spent. This paper concerns this previously latent transactional data and how it is currently recorded, monetised, and used to inform action. What has been recorded in and about money at different moments in time and how are these categories breaking down? Who has access to and ownership over this collectively produced record and how is it driving new data practices and business models based on the monetisation and application of monetary records? And how might re-engaging with money's mnemonic status help to foreground a politics and ethics of transactional data?     

Cultural heritage and the attractiveness of cities: evidence from recreation trips

Many cities are trying to attract tourists by investing in urban amenities. Cultural heritage is an important example, and substantial investments are needed to keep ancient inner cities and characteristic monumental buildings in good shape. The costs of these policies are usually clear, and the benefits are often much more difficult to assess. This paper attempts to fill part of this gap by studying the destination choices of urban recreation trips that have urban recreation as the main travel motive. We estimate a discrete choice model for destination choice that takes into account the potential importance of unobserved characteristics. The model allows us to compute the marginal willingness-to-travel for destinations offering more cultural heritage, which we measure as the area of the inner city that has a protected status because of the cultural heritage that is present there.     

Blockbusters and market expansion: evidence from the motion picture industry

Like other cultural industries, the theatrical film industry is subject to the ‘blockbuster effect’, where popular products often dominate their competition by orders of magnitude over relatively short-run time horizons. This paper investigates this particular feature of the industry and the implication for overall market size. Using simple regression analysis, a positive relationship between (product-level) market concentration and market size is established using weekly box office revenue data from the US motion picture industry. This empirical evidence supports a simple theoretical model of heterogeneous consumers who selectively participate in the market.     

Trust,reputation and ambiguous freedoms: financial institutions and subversive libertarians navigating blockchain,markets, and regulation

This article departs from the post 2008 financial crisis context, from its intersection with technological developments, and from the socio-technical arrangements configured by this conjuncture. It explores plans and actions – of mainstream financial institutions, and of a community seeking for alternatives to centralised economy and governance – for the use of digital platforms supported by blockchain infrastructure. In particular, it explores how such plans and actions relate to conceptions of public and peer trust and how they appear to produce, or reinforce, reputational imaginaries and quantification practices within added value philosophies. By illuminating a tension between the two identified case examples, I seek to render alternative communities’ and financial institutions’ conceptions, imaginaries and practices (more) visible and to analyse their organisational marketing strategies – where there is a pragmatic and discursive operationalisation of technology as well as of trust as means to gain more self-sovereignty in action, while navigating markets and regulated actual world contexts.     

Strategic timing of entry: evidence from video games

This paper investigates how video game publishers’ choice of game release date is affected by the expected level of competition within the game’s product niche. We identify game niches by genre, age-appropriateness, console system, a release cohort, and publisher. First, we show that games are more likely to be released so as to avoid weeks when their niche already faces competition. Next, we show that consumer substitution across games is stronger within most of the dimensions describing product niches. Sales volumes decay quickly after the opening weekend, so at any point in time, a niche will typically be served by few current titles. From this, we calculate that delaying game release 1 week yields substantial increase in revenue for a video game facing higher-than-average competition.     

Combining the travel cost and contingent behavior methods to value cultural heritage sites: Evidence from Armenia

This paper combines the travel cost method (TCM) with contingent behavior questions to estimate domestic visitors’ use values for cultural heritage sites in Armenia, a transition economy in which conservation of cultural monuments is hampered by limited resources. Respondents intercepted at four cultural monuments provided information on their visitation patterns, experience at the site, perception of the state of conservation of the monuments, and rating of the quality of the services and infrastructure. We combine actual trips with stated trips under hypothetical programs that would enhance the conservation of the monuments and improve one of (i) the cultural experience at the site, (ii) the quality of the infrastructure, or (iii) the quality of the services, and use the combined actual and stated trips to fit a panel data model. Our study is one of the few applications of the TCM to value cultural heritage sites. Our investigation shows that (i) significant use values are associated with the four study monuments, and (ii) conservation programs and initiatives that improve the cultural experience, or simply make it easier for the respondent to reach and spend time at the monument, are valued by domestic visitors and would encourage higher visitation rates. Actual and intended trips reported by the respondents exhibit good construct validity, in the sense that they are well predicted by price, location, hypothetical scenario and other individual characteristics of the respondents.

Rational addiction and cultural goods: the case of the Italian theatregoer

This paper tests whether demand for theatre in Italy is consistent with the model of rational addiction presented in Becker and Murphy (J Polit Econ 96(4):675–700, 1988). Data from a novel 34-year panel on regional annual theatre attendance are used to estimate market demand. Four models are applied to investigate the demand function, and all of these also include per capita income and other control variables as regressors. The first two models are estimated to check whether theatregoers are myopically addicted to theatre. The results suggest that the theatre is an addictive good because past consumption (and prices) significantly raises the marginal utility of current consumption. The third model tests the rational addiction hypothesis, which assumes that future attendance also influences current attendance, whilst past and future prices influence current attendance only indirectly through their impact on past and future attendances. However, our most highly specified model, introducing past and future prices, demonstrates that Italian theatregoers are not myopic but fully rational as outlined in Becker and Murphy (1988). The results demonstrate that the rational addiction hypothesis is applicable not only to “harmful” addictions such as alcohol, cigarettes and drug consumption, but also to “beneficial” addictions, such as theatre attendance. This result has important policy implications because theatre is one of the most subsidised performing arts in Italy; if theatregoers are fully rational, policy makers can influence theatre attendance using alternative policy instruments (price and income), thereby reducing government expenditure on theatre subsidies.     

Economics of cultural tourism: issues and perspectives

The special issue aims at exploring, with an economic perspective, the interconnections between cultural participation, in all its expressions, and tourism organization and patterns with the purpose of understanding economic effects, emerging trends and policy implications. The expanding notion of the cultural consumption of tourists makes the definition of cultural tourism increasingly elusive. Empirical investigations of the relationships between cultural participation and cultural heritage and tourism offer interesting hints in many directions. This introduction briefly overviews the premise of this special issue, the literature and the several perspectives taken by the included articles. Aside from their cultural topics—general, intangible or temporary—these essays all tackle some important economic dimensions of tourism. We encourage cultural economists to invest more in these fascinating areas as more than just intellectual tourists.