| Abstract: |
The recent global crisis has forced many countries to a tight fiscal
discipline. As a consequence, the cultural sectors in those countries have
experienced severe budget cuts. In this context, disparate suggestions for
additional sources of revenue available to public institutions have emerged.
In particular, deaccessioning seems able to guarantee the sustainability of
public cultural institutions without serious negative impacts on the fruition
of cultural goods. This paper addresses the consequences that a widespread
deaccessioning would have on private bequests to public institutions. We
develop a sequential game with incomplete information between a Museum and a
Donor. There are two types of museums: one type is committed not to sale its
collection; the second type has no restriction on selling a share of its art
endowment. The Donor does not know the type of Museum. The non-committed
Museum can sale items in the first stage and/or in the third stage. Donors
contribute only in the second stage. Therefore, deaccessioning triggers a
moral hazard problem. We derive a number or results concerning the allocation
of gifts and the decision of deaccessioning and provide numerical simulations
to interpret the parameters. Most notably, with respect to a benchmark case
where deaccessioning is illegal, contributions are reduced when the
non-committed Museum deaccesses in the first stage (separating strategy). If,
however, that Museum does not deaccess at the beginning (pooling strategy),
also the committed Museum receives less than in the benchmark case.
Interestingly, an increase of public grants to Museums (of any type) allows
the non-committed Museum to adopt a pooling strategy, causing a reduction of
donations to the committed Museum. This result provides an intuition for the
widespread resistance of museum directors to deaccessioning and for their
efforts to enforce common and strict guidelines. |