Addiction At the Biennale of Venice

Abstract

In this paper we analyse the socio-economic characteristics (e.g. age, gender, education, nationality) associated with the probability of subscribing to an art review, among visitors of the Visual Arts Biennale of Venice taking into account the heterogeneity of the data. The analysis uses a data set from a questionnaire given in Venice in 2003 to ascertain the key characteristics of the Biennale visitors, (Bernardi, Pizzi and Vecco, 2004). A Bayesian random parameter logit model is used with Gibbs sampling to verify the hypothesis that subscribing to an art review given that the individual visits the Biennale, defines addiction to visual arts. This model outperforms the standard logit model since it takes into account the unobserved heterogeneity of the sample data. Some policy implications are presented.Culture, Biennale of Venice, Mixed Logit model, and policy implications.