M

ARKET

RESEARCH

Measuring Audience Addiction to the Arts: The Case of an Italian Theatre

Alex Turrini A friend i th court is better than a penny in purse. William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part II (v.i. 3031)
the rationale behind public support for the arts shifted to the economic and social benets of culture and the arts (OHagan, 1998; Towse, 2003; Trimarchi, 1993). Different positive externalities have been connected with arts production and consumption: enhancement of personal skills and cognitive abilities (Tofer, 1964), development of social cohesion and national identity (Bradford, Gary and Wallach, 2000; Cummings and Katz, 1987), improvements in urban social life (Bianchini, 1993; Brooks and Kushner, 2001), economic spill-over effects (decreased unemployment rates, increased tourism, etc.) (Heilbrun and Gray, 2001) and maintenance of the option demand for future generations (Dobson and West, 1995). All of these arguments have shaped the debate over public funding of arts institutions as a state tool for enhancing the well-being of society in non-cultural dimensions. Recently, however, research on the public benets of the arts has concluded that it is the intrinsic individual benets (such as fun, intense enjoyment, heightened sense of life, wonder, expanded intelligibility and sensibility) inherent in the arts experience itself that justify the commitment of social resources to the enterprise (McCarthy, Ondaatje, Zakaras and Brooks, 2004): that the point is, in some fundamental way, not to have an opera company or a museum in ones city but to have actual engagement with art on the part of audi-

Introduction
uring the Renaissance the rich and powerful supported artists and writers through what we would now call grants, linked more to the creation of a work than to its consumption by an audience. The direct patronage of King James I of William Shakespeares acting company, acknowledged in Henry IV, was more important than the audience of the playwright. In return, the king basked in the reected glory of a great artist. Throughout the 17th century the Church and the Crown continued to patronize the arts to enhance their own prestige and, sometimes, to maintain political consensus among the people. The rather embarrassing praise of mediocre rulers in dedications of the time, and often in the works themselves, indicates a social consensus that art can even ennoble nobility. As the social role of the artist became removed from that of dignifying or even respecting the powers that be, the debate on
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Alex Turrini (PhD, Management) is Assistant Professor, Institute of Public and Health-Care Management, Bocconi University, Milan, Italy. His main field of research is public policy and management in the arts.

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ences (and on the part of amateur performers and Sunday painters).1 According to this view, public participation in the arts is a precondition for the important benets from the arts and should therefore be the central goal of any arts policy (McCarthy, Ondatje, Zakaras and Brooks, 2004, p. 71). Despite the importance of addressing national and local public policies on the creation of habituation or addiction to ne arts consumption, few studies have examined this phenomenon and, further, few empirical studies have been conducted in order to model repeated audience participation in the arts and to quantify theoretical models such as that of Andreasen (Andreasen, 1991; McCarthy, Ondaatje and Zakaras, 2001; OHare and McNee, 2004). The present paper models patrons of an Italian theatre, and by extension the companys audience, in their path towards habituation to ne arts as consumption as a Markov process (Stokey and Zeckhauser, 1978). It will also propose a methodology for policy analysts to use in evaluating the strategies and policies of arts institutions with regard to existing audiences. By applying the idea of a system (in this case, a customer) that changes state probabilistically and independently of past history to audience participation in the arts, one can determine the degree to which individuals attend arts events and how they move through the different stages that characterize the process of audience appreciation of the arts. Specically, the use of a Markov model allows one to describe the likelihood that an individual in a given audience category will change his or her behaviour and jump from being, for instance, a light participant to being an arts acionado (progression) or vice versa (regres-

sion), and to estimate these transition probabilities using data. Estimation of the so-called short- and long-run transition probabilities can help arts policy-makers and managers to target investments in those segments for which the equilibrium transition probability is lower in terms of their goals for cultivating arts appreciation. The calculation of the transition probabilities connected with the changing behaviour of arts consumers is also a useful tool for framing and evaluating public policies designed to develop new audiences and manage existing ones. I will briey review previous ndings on the process of audience participation in the arts, providing a rationale for the use of Markov processes to describe audience attendance at live performances. I will demonstrate how the theoretical framework can be applied in order to reproduce and control audience behaviour at an Italian theatre. Finally, I will present my conclusions and discuss some policy implications.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Mike OHare (GSPP Berkeley) for his useful insights on this paper. I would also like to thank my PhD colleagues at Bocconi University (Cecilia, Stefano, Piero and Armando) and Dora of the PhD staff for their assistance in carrying out the survey.

Background
esearch on audience participation in the arts can be traced back to 1966 in the eld of cultural economics, as elaborated in Baumol and Bowens (1966) Performing Arts: An Economic Dilemma. Baumol and Bowen underline three phenomena in the arts industry: the demographic and socio-economic consistency in audiences across art forms, the extremely narrow segment of society from which audiences for performing arts were drawn, and the decit situations under which performing arts organizations were operating

ABSTRACT

Given the importance of addressing national and local public policies on the development of habituation or addiction to ne arts consumption, relatively few studies have addressed this phenomenon and little empirical research has been conducted to replicate repeat audience participation in the arts. The author employs Markovs theory to describe the audience of an Italian theatre in their path towards habituation to ne arts consumption. He also proposes a methodology that may be useful for policy analysts and administrators in evaluating the strategies and policies of arts institutions with respect to their existing audiences. Arts policy, audience participation, Markov process, audience surveys, forecasting

KEYWORDS

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and which threatened the quality and even the existence of art (Baumols cost disease). Since that time, many researchers have sought to identify various reasons for participation in the arts, in an attempt to enrich the perspective of Baumol and Bowen and to inform arts management and education. Empirical research has generally measured enduring characteristics of the arts audience (i.e., gender, age, education, social class, arts socialization in childhood) and found them to be good predictors of different levels of participation (Andreasen and Belk, 1982; DiMaggio, Useem and Brown, 1978; National Endowment for the Arts, 1993, 1999, 2004; Uusitalo, 1986).2 In parallel to audience studies, individual and aggregate demand for the arts has been predicted using economic variables like ticket prices, average per-capita income, the weighted average price of substitutes for arts participation (i.e., other leisure activities) and the composite price of complementary services such as transportation, child care and parking (Frey and Pommerehne, 1989; Heilbrun and Gray, 2001; Throsby, 1994; Throsby and Withers, 1979). Other theoretical work on arts participation has considered the interplay of psychological (Scitovsky, 1976), political (Becker, 1982) and social forces (Bourdieu, 1984) as determinants of individual tastes that economists typically consider as a given (see McCarthy, Ondaatje and Zakaras, 2001, for a detailed review). However, owing to a lack of longitudinal data, studies on audience engagement in the arts have generally ignored the path that an individual might follow in becoming an arts acionado and the factors that trigger this phenomenon (McCarthy, Ondaatje and Zakaras, 2001; OHare and McNee, 2004).

The general marketing and consumer behaviour literature has addressed consumer habituation and addiction (Hirschman, 1992; Wathier, 2004).3 However, in terms of art as a particular type of experience (Colbert et al., 2000; Hirschman, 1983; Hirschman and Holbrook, 1982; Holbrook and Schindler, 1994; Holbrook and Zirlin, 1985), very few models and empirical studies have been tested in the arts management and economics eld. Andreasen (1991) uses the US Survey of Public Participation in the Arts to show that the performing arts adoption process is a series of steps describing an individuals progression towards deeper commitment to the performing arts. The model recognizes six different clusters that characterize the typical arts audience. These range from the TRIAL cluster (people who have attended one live performance but are not interested in attending another) to the CONFIRMATION cluster (people who have attended two or more performances and are interested in attending again). While representing one of the rst attempts to describe individual appreciation of and involvement in the arts, this study implies that, in order to reach the nal step in the performing arts adoption process, an individual has to take on the personal qualities of the audience that populates each subsequent cluster, the implication being that arts institutions play a minimal role in building up and maintaining their audiences (and lack the tools to do so). The RAND studies on audience participation in the arts (McCarthy and Jinnett, 2001; McCarthy, Ondaatje, Zakaras and Brooks, 2004) take a different perspective. They describe the decision-making process leading to attendance at live performances as a series of separate decisions rather than a dichotomous single decision (whether or not to participate),

RSUM

tant donn limportance des politiques publiques nationale et locales dans le dveloppement dune accoutumance ou dpendance la consommation des arts, relativement peu dtudes se sont intresses ce phnomne et rares sont les recherches empiriques menes en vue de modliser la participation rpte aux manifestions artistiques. Lauteur a recours la thorie de Markov pour dcrire le public dun thtre italien sur la voie de laccoutumance la consommation des arts. Il propose aussi une mthodologie pouvant tre utile aux analystes et aux administrateurs de politiques dans lvaluation des stratgies et des politiques des organismes du secteur des arts.

MOTS CLS

Politique des arts, participation du public, processus de Markov, sondages auprs du public, prvisions

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as economic research generally has done. In this process, it is the positive reaction of individuals to an arts experience that triggers repeated future attendance, and while social benets and reputational gains may count for something, it is the intensity and other dimensions of engagement in the art itself that really matter. The intrinsic and individual benet is, therefore, not only the main driver of intention to repeat arts experiences, but also the basis on which society as a whole benets from the arts (McCarthy, Ondaatje, Zakaras and Brooks, 2004). According to the RAND model, arts policies should be aimed at having individuals internalize their motivation to participate in the arts, at making the arts stimulating, uplifting, challenging that is intrinsically worthwhile (McCarthy, Ondaatje, Zakaras and Brooks, 2004, p. 77). While academia is only beginning to understand how a performance produces these effects, it is something that impresarios and presenters know intuitively. An economic theory consistent with intrinsic satisfaction as the main driver of repeated arts participation (Stigler and Becker, 1977) views an audience member as a production enterprise who uses expertise acquired through repeated consumption to transform an arts experience into a kind of personal reward. As the consumer becomes more and more efcient at this process, the consumption pattern becomes one of benecial addiction. Stigler and Becker assume that households maximize the utility of non-physical commodities (Z-goods), which they produce using market goods, their time, their skills, their training and other human capital. This type of good does not have a market price, as it cannot be sold or purchased. It has a shadow price, which is equal to the cost of its production. If

we take art appreciation as a Z-good, repeated arts consumption leads to a decrease in the cost of arts appreciation, rendering the production of these metagoods more attractive and cheaper: capital makes this form of production increasingly efcient as it accumulates with consumption. In simple terms, arts consumption becomes more satisfying as the marginal utility of the time spent on arts consumption increases. In other words, an increase in the capital of arts appreciation over time increases the productivity of the time we currently spend on arts appreciation (i.e., the utility per hour we get from it), which results in positively addicting households to arts experiences (Caves, 2000). Psychologists would typically explain this as a phenomenon correlated to increasing individual self-fullment, identication or enrichment (Kelly and Freysinger, 2000), while economists relate it to increasing commitment and/or familiarity with the arts. If households are perfectly rational, by consuming more arts they gradually progress towards a deeper commitment to the arts. Stigler and Beckers model is a powerful one for explaining addictive behaviour in general and positive audience addiction to the arts in particular.4 However, a troublesome aspect of this framework is its deterministic avour. Aside from the difculty of empirically testing its validity (how to measure the cost of production the shadow price of arts appreciation?), counterfactual evidence and casual empiricism show that not everybody becomes addicted to the arts. Regular arts participants include both less-educated individuals and young people, and the majority of well-educated people do not attend live performances. Thus, while recognizing the process of arts habituation and underlining the motivating factors behind arts

RESUMEN

A pesar de la importancia del debate sobre polticas a escala nacional y local que tiendan a promover el hbito o la adiccin al consumo de bellas artes, son relativamente pocos los estudios que se han abocado al fenmeno e igualmente escasa la investigacin emprica tendiente a gracar la participacin repetida del pblico en las artes. El autor se vale de la teora de Markov para describir el camino andado por el pblico de un teatro italiano hasta habituarse al consumo de las bellas artes. Asimismo, propone una metodologa que puede resultar de utilidad a los analistas de polticas y administradores al momento de evaluar las estrategias y polticas de las instituciones artsticas respecto de sus pblicos ya adquiridos.

PALABRAS CLAVE

Poltica de las artes, participacin del pblico, proceso de Markov, encuestas de pblico, pronstico

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habituation, the literature on arts policy offers little tangible data (especially longitudinal) on the path taken by an individual in becoming a heavy consumer of the arts.

Methodology The Markov Model as a Tool for Arts Policy Analysis

Stochastic models can help one to describe and understand individual mobility from one particular state to another by recognizing the probabilistic elements of a process. Formally, a (discrete time) Markov process describes a system that can be in one of several states, i, in each time period and that changes to another state, j, in the next period according to known transition probabilities, pij. In a stationary Markov process, the pij do not change from period to period. The state of the system in period t can be described by the value of a variable, Xt, where X has values 1,2,3,,S for S possible states of the system (Bartholomew, 1982; Puterman, 2005). The Markov property of such a process is that the conditional probability of any future event, given any past event and a present state Xi is independent of the past event and depends only on the present state of the process. In other words, the probability of any particular future behaviour of the process, when its exact present state is known, is not altered by additional knowledge concerning its past behaviour. Initially, this is a highly restrictive assumption, but it is possible to dene the states so that the relevant history of the process is incorporated into the denition of the current state (Stokey and Zeckhauser, 1978). This allows us to take into account the effects of the unmodelled variables that in principle have affected the behaviour of a social system (in our case, the individual behaviour of arts consumers) in the past. In this sense, Markov models capture the theoretical insights of the literature on audience participation in the arts and, in particular, the possibility of rational addiction (OHare and McNee, 2004; Stigler and Becker, 1977). In economic and sociological research such models are often used to describe the mobilVOLUME 8, NUMBER 3 SPRING 2006

ity of a population in terms of social classes (McFarland, 1970); in medical decisionmaking they are employed to describe (and eventually choose among) different prognoses of a disease in order to increase the possibility of recovery by reducing the probability of setbacks (Sonnenberg and Beck, 1993); in social policy and public management Markov models are used to help decision-makers predict the recovery path that those addicted to alcohol or drugs will follow (Everingham and Rydell, 1994; Rydell and Everingham, 1994). The same could apply to arts policy and management. If we divide a market population into three classes of attendees dened by their frequency of attendance within a time period, and allow each person to remain in a class in the next period, n + 1, or to move to another class (for any number of reasons, from a change in social status or taste to the effect of some arts policy), that typical audience member is a system whose behaviour is modelled by a Markov process. By estimating the nine probabilities that each individual belonging to each class in one period will move to each possible class in the next period, we can make a variety of inferences about the properties of an audience comprising these individuals. If management policies are seen as changing the transition probabilities, their effect on audience size and distribution can be similarly predicted (see Figure 1). Markov models also allow for the possibility of both upward and downward movement between classes of attendance. This ts well with casual empiricism but has never been explored. Once we have a transition probability matrix (which includes all the probabilities associated with an individual moving from class X to class Y), we confront various competing policies in terms of their success in achieving the stated objectives. Thus arts policy can have a clear, precise, empirically grounded conclusion. This allows for better ex post evaluation of the policy. Finally, in many instances we are interested in how to construct and operate a system so as to meet specied needs. Such planning will usually begin with the designing of the system and a prediction of the limiting behaviour of the Markov process in the face of if present trends continue conditions.
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FIGURE 1

TRANSITION DIAGRAM FOR AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT

P1,1 CLASS I

P3,1

P2,1

P1,3

P1,2

P3,3 CLASS III P2,3 P3,2 CLASS II

P2,2

Following analysis, the projected structure will rarely correspond with what is desired. The question then is: What can be done to alter things? When forecasting the limiting behaviour, we were given the transition probabilities and we wished to know what the future stock numbers would be, but the problem is to nd the ow numbers needed to achieve them. In the next section I will illustrate a relevant experiment.

The Case of Milans Piccolo Teatro

I will now apply a Markov model to the audience of Milans Piccolo Teatro in order to estimate its one-step transition probabilities (P) for describing audience behaviour, assess its limitations and assess its utility for evaluating policies directed at institutional sustainability. The Piccolo Teatro is among Europes most famous theatres. Founded by Giorgio Strehler and Paolo Grassi in 1947, it was one of the rst repertory theatres in Italy. Since its founding, the Piccolo Teatro has focused on audi48

ence development, mounting campaigns to attract people from around the world. The Piccolo Teatros mission is expressed in the words spoken by Grassi and Strehler on the theatres opening night in 1947: We will seek our audience among workers and among young people in factories, ofces and schools and will intensify the relationship between the theatre and its audience by offeringinexpensive tickets. This is not an experimental theatreaccessible only to the few, but a theatre for everybody. (Trezzini, 1989, p. 3132; my translation) Consistent with this mission, in recent times the theatre has employed a variety of audience development tools in order to reach as many people as possible. These tools include differentiation of products (most experimental plays are now staged in the Teatro Studio), differentiation of ticket prices and subscription types, development of various distribution channels (tickets are now sold through intermediaries such as banks and over the Internet), and aggressive promotional and communications campaigns.
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I estimated the transition probability matrix by collecting the frequencies of attendance in past seasons through a general audience survey. According to the literature on Markovs theory, if the sample is sufciently large (more than 100 units) and is representative of the population of interest, the law of large numbers allows us to use the proportions of units that transit from one class to another as estimators of the transition probabilities for the population (i.e., the audience of Piccolo Teatro) (Bartholomew, 1982; Stokey and Zeckhauser, 1978).

Sampling Design
It would have been ideal to have a longitudinal data set containing the past frequencies of attendance for each Piccolo Teatro consumer. As is almost universally the case for arts audiences, no such data set was available, so we used a cross-section from a general survey of the audience of one production staged in Teatro Strehler, the largest of Piccolo Teatros three venues. Data were collected at repertory performances of Opera Buffa, a piece by an Italian dramatist staged at Teatro Strehler. Since this was the last production of the season, we were able to collect reasonably accurate data on past attendance, instead of having to rely on data on intention to attend in the future or on respondents image of their theatre-attending proclivities; in surveys on subjects like ne arts consumption, the presentation of self commonly serves to bias responses towards those that are widely regarded as attering (OHare, 1974). This method of data collection enabled us to make some inferences about the population (i.e., the total audience of the production) from which the sample was extracted. Data were collected through a questionnaire measuring the frequency of attendance at live performances staged in two different seasons in all three of Piccolo Teatros venues (Teatro Strehler, Teatro Grassi and Teatro Studio). The questionnaire was pretested 15 days in advance by graduate students at Bocconi University in Milan. We were thus able to reformulate questions on the basis of pretest results. The sample was intended to represent the audience of Teatro Piccolo, assuming that the
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Opera Buffa audience was typical of the Piccolo Teatro audience during the season. Within this population, multistage sampling was carried out (Chisnall, 1987). By considering each performance of Opera Buffa as a natural cluster, we randomly selected four evenings (i.e., four clusters) to distribute the questionnaire. On these evenings, we randomly selected respondents by giving a questionnaire to every third person. The sampling results are shown in Table 1. People were given the questionnaire at the entrance to the theatre before the performance and were asked to return it at the end of the performance. Audience members who were not invited to participate but volunteered to complete the questionnaire were excluded from the study.

Results
he questionnaire obtained recall of specic productions attended in the current season and each of the two previous seasons. Consequently it was possible to estimate the fractions of the audience in each of the three attendance categories (casual attendees, frequent attendees and acionados)5 in the current season as well as the transition probabilities from the fraction of respondents who had been in each class during the previous season. The latter estimates provided the onestep transition probabilities matrix in Table 2. TABLE 1
Cluster 1 2 3 4 Total Invalid questionnaires Valid questionnaires

SAMPLING RESULTS
Questionnaires distributed* 318 334 278 302 1,232 Redemption (number) 135 167 125 156 583 18 (3.09%) 565 (96.91%) Redemption (%) 42.45 50.00 44.96 51.66 47.32

*Total audience each evening = 892. Step 1: 3

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TABLE 2

PROBABILITY OF AUDIENCE CHANGING CLASS AFTER ONE SEASON

Season 2 Casual attendee (%) Casual attendee 44.1 5.0 1.7 Frequent attendee (%) 38.6 75.7 23.7 Acionado (%) 17.2 19.3 74.6 =p

Season 1

Frequent attendee Acionado

The percentages in shaded areas show a very small degree of mobility in this population. If Piccolo Teatros strategies remain unchanged, the probability that an attendee will stay in the same class the next season is in fact very high. In sum, there is a 74.6% probability that a acionado will remain an acionado, a 75.7% probability that a frequent attendee will remain a frequent attendee and a 44.1% probability that a casual attendee will remain a casual attendee. The matrix underlines the presence of decreasing mobility among the three classes, thus introducing the possibility of jumps and regressions in the consumer path towards increasing appreciation of arts. Some mobility among the classes can, however, be seen. As for progression, more than a third of casual attendees will become frequent attendees (38.6% probability) in the next season and almost a fth of frequent attendees will become acionados. Regression is rare, although 24% of acionados will become frequent attendees in the next two seasons. Piccolo Teatro obviously benets from the retention of heavy consumers of arts (frequent attendees and acionados) by trying to minimize regression to previous classes and by neglecting to upgrade and develop those consumers with low levels of attendance frequency. The transition probabilities discussed above enable the theatres management to consider what audience development policies might be effective in the future. In fact, providing Piccolo Teatro retains its current audience development strategy, one can make a longrange forecast.
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As the Markov process is a-periodic and irreducible (Bartholomew, 1982), we can calculate the limiting behaviour of P, the transition probability matrix. In particular, if the theatres policy remains unchanged, the steady-state probability of the process will be as shown in Table 3. TABLE 3 FORECAST COMPOSITION OF ARTS AUDIENCE WITH NO CHANGE IN POLICY
% of audience Casual attendee Frequent attendee Acionado 5.9 51.2 42.9

This means that in the long run there is a 5.9% probability that an individual will be a casual attendee, a 51.2% probability that he will be a frequent attendee and a 42.9% probability that he will be an acionado. These proportions hold regardless of the initial transition probabilities and are aligned with the overall stability of the theatres arts policy. Therefore, if we apply the same probabilities to a cohort of 1,000 individuals, 59 will be casual attendees, 512 will be frequent attendees and 429 will be acionados in the long run. Note that steady-state probabilities imply not that people stop moving from one class to another, only that the percentage of the population in each class stabilizes to constant values. The obvious managerial question raised by such a model is whether these percentages are
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optimal. Although it might appear that management should try to maximize the number of people in the acionado class, this would mean reducing the number of new audience members. Table 4 shows the transition probabilities that the theatre might prefer: a decrease in the number of casual attendees changing to frequent attendees and acionados in order to recruit more new audience members. One possible step would be to develop communications policies that overcome the barriers perceived by certain members of the public, portraying the arts as more accessible, tangible and closely related to their everyday lives. Such policies could serve to change the audience composition, as indicated in Table 5. This composition does not represent a change in audience size as measured by visits, but reects a larger audience as measured by individual persons: a hundred visits by casual attendees represents many more people than a hundred visits by acionados.

TABLE 5

FORECAST COMPOSITION OF ARTS AUDIENCE WITH CHANGE IN POLICY

% of audience

Casual attendee Frequent attendee Acionado

7.5 50.9 42.6

Conclusions and Policy Implications

he Markov model is a useful tool for describing the process of audience habituation to the arts, for supporting the development of organizational arts policies, and for ex post evaluation and implementation of an institutions strategies. With regard to forecasting audience behaviour, however, organizations might consider more qualitative measures with which to evaluate audience participation for instance, by considering whether various activities serve its overall mission. TABLE 4

While models of this kind can be implemented usefully with a single survey, to the degree that we can trust respondents recollection of events they have attended (this is much easier for performing arts than for museums, for example, where individual visits are harder to distinguish in ones memory), they can be improved upon in at least two ways. The rst is to include the large population of non-attendees. People in all three of our classes moved back and forth among them. Their reasons for doing so included death, relocation and loss of interest. Instead of extracting a sample from the existing audience of a given theatre, one could construct a sample of a local population by estimating the arts mobility of the general population. In this study, we could observe the probability of a nonattendee remaining a non-attendee and could estimate the number of non-attendees in the long run if public policies in the arts remained unchanged. The modelling of such mobility could be useful not only for a single theatre, but also for public policy-makers interested in increasing the awareness and involvement of non-audiences in a particular art form, regardless of the presenting organization.

PROBABILITY OF AUDIENCE CHANGING CLASS AFTER ONE SEASON

Season 2 Casual attendee (%) Casual attendee 56.8 5.0 1.7 Frequent attendee (%) 33.1 75.7 23.7 Acionado (%) 10.1 19.3 74.6 = s*

Season 1

Frequent attendee Acionado

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A sharper focus on non-attendees of live performances implies a need to modify the Markov model used in the present study. In this study, in fact, we treated the audience of a single theatre as a closed system, where gains and losses are not considered. Changing the no gains and losses hypothesis would require a modelling of the audience as an open system where new recruitment, for example, is possible. The application of Markovs general theory to open social systems is not so different from that for closed systems. However, one might take advantage of recently developed sophisticated tools to precisely program new entrants and prevent people from becoming completely discouraged with the arts. The second way for an organization to improve upon the Markov model is to maintain an ongoing survey instead of using the more common one-off survey conducted every few years. Time-series data, especially panel data that track respondents over several periods (typically expensive to collect), would be extremely valuable for our understanding of audience behaviour.

References
Andreasen, A.R. 1991. Expanding the Audience for the Performing Arts. Washington: National Endowment for the Arts. Andreasen, A.R., and R.W. Belk. 1982. The Effect of Family Life Cycle on Arts Patronage. Journal of Cultural Economics, Vol. 6, no 2, p. 5678. Bartholomew, D.J. 1982. Stochastic Models for Social Processes. New York: John Wiley. Baumol, W., and W.G. Bowen. 1966. Performing Arts the Economic Dilemma. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Becker, G., M. Grossman and K.M. Murphy. 1994. An Empirical Analysis of Cigarette Addiction. American Economic Review, Vol. 84, no 3, p. 396 418. Becker, H. 1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bianchini, F., ed. 1993. Cultural Policy and Urban Regeneration. New York: Manchester University Press. Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bradford, G., M. Gary and G. Wallach. 2000. The Politics of Culture: Policy Perspectives for Individuals, Institutions, and Communities. New York: New Press. Brooks, A.C., and R. Kushner. 2001. Cultural Policy and Urban Development. International Journal of Arts Management, Vol. 3, no 2, p. 415. Caves, R.E. 2000. Creative Industries: Contracts between Arts and Commerce. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chisnall, R. 1987. Marketing Research. New York: John Wiley. Colbert, F., J. Nantel, S. Bilodeau and J.D. Rich. 2001. Marketing Culture and the Arts, 2nd ed. Montreal: Presses HEC. Cummings, M.C., and R.S. Katz. 1987. The Patron State. New York: Oxford University Press. DiMaggio, P.J., M. Useem and P. Brown. 1978. Audience Studies of the Performing Arts and Museums: A Critical Review. Washington: National Endowment for the Arts. Dobson, L.C., and E.G. West. 1995. Performing Arts Subsidies and Future Generations. In Cultural Economics: The Arts, the Heritage and the Media Industries, R. Towse, ed. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, p. 98114. Everingham, S.S., and C.P. Rydell. 1994. Modeling the Demand for Cocaine. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation. Frey, B.S., and W.W. Pommerehne. 1989. Muses and Markets: Explorations in the Economics of the Arts. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Heilbrun, J., and C.H. Gray. 2001. The Economics of Art and Culture. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
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Notes
1. As McCarthy, Ondaatje, Zakaras and Brooks (2004) put it: The research on cognitive, behavioral and health effects of the arts focuses largely on outer lives, on observable effects that are measured by dened indicators such as improved test scores, more cooperative behavior, and better health outcomes. Given what we know about the roots of behavioral change, these external effects can be described as the outer manifestations of inner shifts in beliefs and attitudes that can ensue from the arts experience (p. 5657). 2. If we take non-musical plays as an example, we might in fact note that while only 12.3% of the total US adult population attend live performances at least once a year, they are generally women (59.9%), are over 45 (49.9%), are college graduates (53.6%) and earn more than $50,000 (64.7%) (National Endowment for the Arts, 2004). 3. As Wathier (2004) puts it: Patterns of habituation and sensitization are well known to neurobiologists and behavioural psychologists They are typical of nonassociative learning; that is, of response patterns induced by stimulus repetition or withdrawal (as opposed to classical conditioning whereby several stimuli are used in association) (p. 587). 4. The same theory applied to music consumption has been applied to other areas such as drug and cigarette consumption (Becker, Grossman and Murphy, 1994). 5. In particular, we distinguish three different states: casual attendee : 13 live performances per season; frequent attendee : 46 live performances per season; acionado : subscriber with more than 7 performances per season. It should be noted that we referred to live performances that were attended in the same theatre (in this case Piccolo Teatro) and not to the total live performances attended by an individual.

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