Search

The recent global crisis has forced many countries to a tight fiscal discipline. As a consequence, the cultural sectors in those countries have experienced severe budget cuts. In this context, disparate suggestions for additional sources of revenue available to public institutions have emerged. In particular, deaccessioning seems able to guarantee the sustainability of public cultural institutions without serious negative impacts on the fruition of cultural goods. This paper addresses the consequences that a widespread deaccessioning would have on private bequests to public institutions. We develop a sequential game with incomplete information between a Museum and a Donor. There are two types of museums: one type is committed not to sale its collection; the second type has no restriction on selling a share of its art endowment. The Donor does not know the type of Museum. The non-committed Museum can sale items in the first stage and/or in the third stage. Donors contribute only in the second stage. Therefore, deaccessioning triggers a moral hazard problem. We derive a number or results concerning the allocation of gifts and the decision of deaccessioning and provide numerical simulations to interpret the parameters. Most notably, with respect to a benchmark case where deaccessioning is illegal, contributions are reduced when the non-committed Museum deaccesses in the first stage (separating strategy). If, however, that Museum does not deaccess at the beginning (pooling strategy), also the committed Museum receives less than in the benchmark case. Interestingly, an increase of public grants to Museums (of any type) allows the non-committed Museum to adopt a pooling strategy, causing a reduction of donations to the committed Museum. This result provides an intuition for the widespread resistance of museum directors to deaccessioning and for their efforts to enforce common and strict guidelines.

Theory of rational voting states that, with positive voting costs, people would vote only when they are pivotal. This hypothesis is contradicted by the frequent observation of relatively high rates of electoral turnout. In the last decades several solutions to the paradox have been investigated. Within a behavioral approach, studies suggest that dynamics emerging in a group may induce its members to conform to cooperative or ethical behavior and consequently encourage voting participation. Such dynamics remind the source of social capital defined by Bourdieu (1986) as “the nature of the social obligations, connections, and networks available to you”. In this paper we investigate the influence of social interaction and cultural consumption on voting turnout using data from British Household Panel Surve. The analysis highlights the role of hierarchical groups on electoral participation as well as the effect of residential mobility in weakining social connections.

Dynamic models of learning and adaptation have provided realistic predictions in terms of voting behavior. This study aims at contributing to their empirical verification by investigating voting behavior in terms of participation as well as choice. We test through panel data methods an outcome-based learning mechanism based on the following assumptions: (a) people expect that the party they do not support will be unable to bring economic improvements; (b) they receive a feedback whose impact depends on the consistency between their last voting behavior and personal economic improvements (or worsening) from the last election; (c) they tend to discard choices associated to an inconsistent feedback. Results show that feedbacks of this sort affect persistence of voting behavior, interpreted as participation and voting choice. Age and trade union affiliation reinforce this adaptive behavior. The analysis also investigates the intensity of the learning feedback, differentiating between a strong inconsistent feedback, which leads to a vote switch in favor of the opponent party, and a weak inconsistent feedback, which induces just abstention rather than a vote switch.

Dynamic models of learning and adaptation have provided realistic predictions in terms of voting behavior. This study aims at contributing to their scant empirical verification. We develop a learning algorithm based on bounded rationality estimating the pattern of learning process through a two-stage econometric model. The analysis links voting behavior to past choices and economic satisfaction derived from previous period election and state of the economy. This represents a novelty in the literature on voting that assumes given voter preferences. Results show that persistence is positively affected by the combination of income changes and past behavior and by union membership.

Dynamic models of learning and adaptation have provided realistic predictions in terms of voting behavior. This study aims at contributing to their scant empirical verification. We develop a learning algorithm based on bounded rationality estimating the pattern of learning process through a two-stage econometric model. The analysis links voting behavior to past choices and economic satisfaction derived from previous period election and state of the economy. This represents a novelty in the literature on voting that assumes given voter preferences. Results show that persistence is positively affected by the combination of income changes and past behavior and by union membership.