Better an egg today than a hen tomorrow: On the implications of deaccess policies on donations to museums

Luigi Di Gaetano () and Isidoro Mazza ()

No AWP-01-2014, ACEI Working Paper Series from Association for Cultural Economics International

Abstract: Severe budget cuts in the cultural sectors of many countries have spurred disparate suggestions for alternative sources available to public institutions. Deaccessioning may contribute to guarantee the survival of cultural institutions without serious negative impacts on the fruition of cultural goods. This paper addresses the consequences of a widespread deaccessioning on in-kind bequests to museums, by developing a sequential game with incomplete information. We look at the interactions between a donor and a museum. The latter could be either institutionally committed not to sale its collection, or free to sell part of its art endowment. Our main results show that when deaccessioning is allowed, contributions to museums of both types may decrease. Interestingly, public grants to museums cause a negative externality to the committed museum, which experiences a reduction in donations. Results provide intuitions also for the widespread resistance to deaccessioning of public museum directors, for their efforts to enforce common regulation, and also for the proliferation of private art museums.

Keywords: deaccessioning; museums; asymmetric information; sequential game (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C73 D82 D83 Z10 Z11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2014-04, Revised 2014-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cta and nep-cul
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http://files.culturaleconomics.org/papers/AWP-01-2014.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: “Better an egg today than a hen tomorrow” on the implications of deaccess policies for donations to museums (2017)
Working Paper: “Better an egg today than a hen tomorrow?” On the implications of deaccess policies on donations to museums (2012)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cue:wpaper:awp-01-2014

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