Attributes of Cultural Goods : From Mass Media to the Performing Arts

The consensus view of economists is that the formation of wants does not fall within the province of economic analysis: it is contended that the objective of economic analysis is to observe the consequences of choices which reveal underlying preference structures, not to question the psychological and physiological causes of wants or to investigate the mechanisms governing the formation of preferences. This may be a correct procedure when we refer to ordinary functional goods. Troubles come in when we consider cultural goods that share, in different degrees, two common features (i) their consumption requires skills that can be generated only through education and actual consumption activity and (ii) the hedonic experience stemming from their consumption generates positive and negative psychological feedbacks. In this paper I set up a simple model of local rational learning capturing these features which stem from the fact that goods' consumption generates local affection or disaffection processes whose characteristics depend on the nature of goods and on the type of agent. Building on it, I investigate the reliability of conventional contingent valuation techniques in the context of the revelation of demand for cultural goods. Finally, I discuss the main implications of the model for the design of cultural policies stressing the need of public support to general as well as aesthetic education.