Feeorfree.docVIP

Fee or free? Ingeborg Been Krista Visscher René Goudriaan Introduction Dutch policymakers in the cultural sector face a problem. Attendance to museums is not rising anymore despite the growth of the population and the number of museums. The average visitor is getting older. New visitors are difficult to attract. Only attendance to special exhibitions (‘blockbusters’) has increased, often at the expense of regular attendance to the permanent collections. The Dutch government strives for museums to reach a bigger part of the population. Question is what the Dutch policymakers should use as a remedy. Would free admission solve the problem? Answering this question, policymakers get confused by the fact that the literature reports two conflicting effects of free admission on the number of visits. Economic studies tell us that individual preferences are much more influential than entrance fees. Other studies and newspaper-articles tell us the opposite. As a result of introducing free admission to the national museums in the UK in 2001, the number of visits increased sharply. Similar results were obtained when the French museums started with a free Sunday once a month. In this paper we discuss possible explanations for these contradictory effects. In order to find an answer we take our cases from the two countries mentioned above: the United Kingdom and France. National policy varies in both countries. We use two case studies on how the number and composition of visitors changed after introduction of distinct forms of free admission. The cases are: the Victoria Albert museum in London and the Louvre in Paris. First we give a brief introduction of the basic micro-economic theory, as it frames the relation between price and demand. We then discuss some results on the empirical relationship between price and museum visits found in the research literature. We then move on to our two cases, and conclude on the potential effect of free admission. Theory Micro economic th