Frequency of museum attendance: motivation matters

Abstract

Some recent empirical contributions have highlighted that tourists often go to museums yet appear to extract little utility from the experience. We argue that this is often the case with agents who visit museums only while on holiday and results from a temporary lack of substitute experience goods or compliance with a must-do list. If such agents behaved according to Stigler and Becker’s rational addiction theory, they would also visit museums while at home. However, most do not, which makes them constantly occasional consumers. We indirectly test for the presence of constantly occasional museum attendance by tourists, using data from a survey conducted in 2012 at Vittoriale, the most popular museum at Lake Garda, a renowned Italian tourist destination. By applying multiple correspondence analysis to a question on motivations to visit the museum, we obtain two dimensions of motivation: one based on a search for knowledge and the other based on a more recreational attitude. Identification of the latter is a new finding in itself. We include these dimensions as regressors in a model used to explain museum attendance. We find, as expected, that light consumption negatively affects attendance. We therefore argue that empirical analyses of museum attendance should not disregard light motivation as a possible driver.