The One-Man Band by the Quick Lunch Stand: Modeling Audience Response to Street Performance

Roland Kushner and Arthur Brooks

Journal of Cultural Economics, 2000, vol. 24, issue 1, 65-77

Abstract: This paper considers street performance, or busking,focusing on differences between performance in thisenvironment compared with the standard concertsetting. First, in contrast with a set, known ticketprice, the price of street performance isendogenously determined. Second, busking generallyinvolves a joint product: music and charity, wherecharity is produced internally by the audience andhas as its principal input the price paid for music.We show that these facts call into question somegeneral conclusions of conventional public financemodels, which suggest that the major efficiency problemwith busking is its inability to preventfreeriding behavior, and that freeriding, while efficient at the individuallevel, is inefficient at the societal level. In contrast, we argue in thispaper that busking, with freeriding and all, is not unambiguously inferior toconcert hall performance in terms of efficiency. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2000

Keywords: busking; freeriding; street performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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DOI: 10.1023/A:1007585518269

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