Spatial dependence in museum services: an analysis of the Italian case
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Spatial dependence in museum services: an analysis of the Italian case Roberto Cellini1 · Tiziana Cuccia1 · Domenico Lisi1 Received: 17 February 2019 / Accepted: 13 December 2019 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract In this paper we investigate whether the services offered by museums are affected by the choices of neighbors, and we discuss whether the evidence can document that competition processes are at work. Specifically, we take into account the Italian case, where governmental and private museums coexist. Resorting to spatial autoregressive models, we show that the choices of a museum concerning services’ supply are significantly influenced by the choices of its neighbors. However, we cast several doubts that this piece of evidence can be solely due to sound competition among museums. Keywords Museum · Services · Competition · Spatial dependence · Italy JEL Classification Z10 · C21 · L33 · L83
1 Introduction This paper aims to study whether the choice of a museum concerning the service provision is influenced by the choices of its neighbors; we also aim to understand which mechanisms underpin the neighborhood effects. The services under our investigation concern activities aimed to enlarge the museum accessibility (e.g., evening openings, upon-request openings, etc.), supporting activities to improve the collection fruition (e.g., the availability of brochures, the presence of audio guides, the presence of guided tours, the provision of childcare activities, and so on), and * Roberto Cellini [email protected] Tiziana Cuccia [email protected] Domenico Lisi [email protected] 1
Department of Economics and Business (DEI), University of Catania, Corso Italia, 55, 95129 Catania, CT, Italy
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Vol.:(0123456789)
Journal of Cultural Economics
the presence of web services. We investigate whether the availability of such services in a museum is influenced by the availability of similar services in neighboring museums. As it happens in the supply of other public services, like education and health care (see, e.g., Matlock et al. 2014; Guccio and Lisi 2016; Longo et al. 2017), the reasons to expect that such a spatial influence in services’ provision does exist can be related to a number of factors: competition pressure, imitation mechanisms among the managers (peer effect), institutional rules leading museums to make similar choices. In fact, museums are institutions that offer different services. In economic terms, museums can be assimilated to multi-product or multi-services firms whose production function includes collection, conservation, research and exhibition of statements of tangible and intangible cultural heritage (Fernandez-Blanco and Prieto-Rodriguez 2011). The weight of the different functions of museums, and the way in which the museum functions are perceived, has been changing over time. Museums are no longer cultural institutions mainly devoted to the conservation of arts items; museums are called to provide both local residents and foreign visitors wi
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