Empathy in history. Understanding a past institution (ordeal) in children and young adults when description and rationale are provided

A total of 150 students, from 8 to 25 years, were interviewed about ordeal¹ in the Middle Ages, after reading a shorter and simplified version of a text used in previous research on this topic (e.g., [Lee, P. J., & Ashby, R. (2001). Empathy, perspective taking, and rational understanding. In O. L. Davis, Jr., S. Foster, & E. Yaeger (Eds.), Historical empathy and perspective taking in the social studies (pp. 21–50). Lanham: Rowman and Littleffeld]). Unlike previous studies, at all ages nearly all students understood that ordeal involved the intervention of God, and was related to religious beliefs different from the present. With age, there was an increase in the number of students also referring to the backwardness of the Middle Ages, or stating that at least some Medieval peoples did not expect ordeal to be decisive about the guilt or innocence of an accused, using it instead to find a culprit in any case, or as a punishment or deterrent.     

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.     

Who is an artist? Heterogeneity and professionalism among visual artists

The purpose of this article was twofold. Firstly, to investigate the heterogeneity among artists as an occupational category and secondly, to define arts as a profession and thereby to make a distinction between professional artists and amateurs. Artists' income and working conditions have been the subject of several studies, and many different sampling criteria have been used. Scholars have not yet achieved consensus on who should be included in the profession. In this article, we make an innovative contribution to this conversation. By applying a finite mixture model, which combines latent profile and latent class analysis, we have been able to identify different segments of artists in terms of professionalism. Each of these mutually exclusive classes is characterized by a particular income and working situation. We also include a membership function, estimated through a logistic regression, which allows prediction of the probability that an individual will belong to each class, given his/her socioeconomic characteristics. The subject of our study is Danish visual artists. The dataset consists of a combination of register data from Statistics Denmark and data collected from a questionnaire survey with 892 respondents. Based on the artists’ civil registration numbers, the two sources have been merged into a unique dataset. Our finite mixture model shows the heterogeneity among artists. Combined with a theoretically definition of arts as a profession, our research propose a distinction between professional artists and amateurs that cuts across categories used in prior literature. The results can be beneficial to cultural policy.