Now taking requests...
I’ve been off the blog for a few weeks, with a number of posts begun but none ready for public consumption. I’m in for back surgery tomorrow - nothing too serious - that will have me housebound for a spell and I’ll need something to keep the little gray cells active.
So, in the comment section here I will take your requests. What are questions relating to, or even vaguely adjacent to, arts and culture policy / economics that I might be able to take a stab at. Or even questions that have nothing to do with any of those things. I’ll do my best, though some answers might take longer than others…
I'd be interested in knowing if you have a reaction to this policy brief: https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-URL/wp-content/uploads/sites/412/2025/10/30185122/Price-Gouging-Captive-Customers.pdf which would limit the ability to mark up food and beverage prices at entertainment venues. Would it have an impact on ticket pricing?
The target is mostly intended to be sports venues and airports, and I'm not sure anyone has thought through the impact on more mission-driven endeavors.
Wishing you a speedy recovery, and thank you for your invitation.
I have been giving an introductory course in cultural economics to students aged 23-24 for several years. Unfortunately, I find that cultural economics textbooks (in French and in English) are not very good to interest students who are focussing on a career in the field of arts and culture. The beginning of my course is about cost disease in the performing arts and the existence of stars and superstars. The advantage is that we have for these two subjects solid theoretical models that are quite simple to explain (Baumol and Bowen, Rosen, Adler, and MacDonald), but that's all! The rest of my course deals with the economic functions of copyright, the digital revolution (pricing, piracy, platforms, streaming…) and the economic impact of a cultural activity but I would like to have other simple theoretical models at my disposal. What we find in the textbooks is very descriptive and quite often superficial, which is quickly boring... However, I always try to offer course chapters for which economic analysis brings a real understanding of a phenomenon, based on explicit assumptions which are combined in a simple theoretical model.
Do you know any really good textbooks that allow you to build an introductory course with a diversity of relatively untechnical theoretical models that are really interesting, really instructive, really helpful to understand cultural behaviours? For example, I think that a course chapter on the sale and the resale of concert tickets could really be interesting, based on empirical elements and a simple theoretical model at first and then complicated to illustrate the diversity of observable behaviours. But no textbook offers this.
Another subject would be to explain why cultural industries (music, books, films...) are made up of oligopolies (major companies) with a competitive fringe of small firms. Where is, in a introductory textbook, the simple theoretical model to distinguish and combine the three or four explanatory factors of this phenomenon?
Thanks for your posts.
Yann, from France