What price culture? – a taxonomy of the admission pricing policy at museums

Abstract

ABSTRACT An admission pricing policy should allow a museum to facilitate access to cultural education and heritage while contributing to its economical sustainability. Despite the importance of this matter to museums, design-relevant knowledge on the configuration of the admission pricing policy in museums remains limited, resulting in museum decision-makers lack the necessary understanding of how to customize their admission pricing policy, and researchers the foundation for advancing knowledge on the topic. To address these issues, we draw on a well-established development method to build a taxonomy, which involved synthesising the literature on the admission pricing policy of museums, analysing the characteristics of the admission pricing policy of 149 museums, and creating a cluster analysis for 117 museums located in the same region. The analysis yielded three distinct clusters (namely, free admission pricing policy, simple admission pricing policy, comprehensive admission pricing policy). Our work supports practitioners by showing them different options for structuring an admission pricing policy, while providing researchers with a foundation for further investigating museums’ admission pricing policies.