No abstract

This paper reports results from a field experiment conducted to study the effect of incentives offered to high school teens to motivate them to visit art museums. A vast literature exists on the design of incentives to modify the behavior of firms and consumers, but not much is known about incentives offered to adolescents and young adults to affect their cultural consumption behavior. Students in the first treatment receive a flier with basic information and opening hours of a main museum in Florence, Italy -Palazzo Vecchio. Students in the second treatment receive the flier and a short presentation conducted by an art expert about the exhibit; students in the third treatment, in addition to the flier and the presentation, receive also a non-financial reward in the form of extra-credit points towards their school grade. The analysis yields two main findings. First, non-financial reward is more effective at inducing the students to undertake the encouraged visit than either the simple presentation or the basic information with the flier. Second, over a longer time horizon the non-financial reward does not induce a significant change in behavior with respect to the simple presentation. JEL Classifications: M52, D82, C93, I28, Z10, Z18

The economics literature has shown that individual behaviour is not necessarily driven by rational principles but is mainly influenced by emotional and habit-related factors (Hoffman et al. 2017). An opportunity to test individual transport attitudes was offered by a radical change in the mobility pattern induced for a short period by a big event which took place in Florence, a medium-sized historical Italian city. This event offered an opportunity to analyse how commuters adapted to the transport reorganization, which aimed to prevent car use during the event. We perform an empirical analysis on a sample of employees, comparing transport choices during the event to their stated ordinary behaviour. The paper focuses on analysing the decision to modify transport choice in changed circumstances with particular reference to changes in general transport costs (GTC). The findings highlight that, notwithstanding a sizeable shift in relative convenience among alternative modes as measured by GTC, commuters and especially car drivers showed resistance to adapting to the big event.

Public works often suffer from long durations and time escalations, which entail the dissatisfaction of collective needs. Using micro-level data on the works recently procured by the municipalities of a large Italian region, we analyse delay incurrence and the subsequent time-to-completion of works. For this purpose, we rely on a split-population duration model. Our findings show that appropriate levels of expertise and experience – which are often believed to be lacking in municipalities – have a role in speeding up works' executions. The lack of experience is actually an issue that requires appropriate policy remedies, in that it brings to higher delay probability and longer delay durations. The same applies to municipalities that resort to late payments in response to budget constraints.

This paper revisits results from a field experiment conducted in Florence, Italy to study the effects of incentives offered to high school teens to motivate them to visit art museums and to identify best practices to transform this behavior into a long run cultural consumption. Students belonging to a first group of classes receive a flier with basic information and opening hours of a main museum in Florence, Palazzo Vecchio. Students in a second group of classes receive the flyer and a short presentation conducted by an art expert. Students in a third group of classes, in addition to the flyer and the presentation, receive also a nonfinancial reward in the form of extra-credit points towards their school grade. Taking a Principal Stratification approach, we explore the causal pathways that may lead students to increase their future museum attendance. Within the strata defined by compliance to the three forms of encouragement, we estimate associative and dissociative principal causal effects, that is, effects of the encouragement on the primary outcome, long run cultural consumption, that are associative or dissociative with respect to the effects of the encouragements on the Palazzo Vecchio visit. This analysis allows to interpret these effects as ascribable either to the encouragements, or to the museum visit, or to classroom spillovers. To face identification issues, estimation is performed with Bayesian inferential methods using hierarchical models to account for clustering. The main findings of the analysis are as follows: what seems to matter the most is the motivational incentive (i.e., the presentation), rather than the induced experience, i.e., the Palazzo Vecchio visit.