What price culture? – a taxonomy of the admission pricing policy at museums

ABSTRACT

An admission pricing policy should allow a museum to facilitate access to cultural education and heritage while contributing to its economical sustainability. Despite the importance of this matter to museums, design-relevant knowledge on the configuration of the admission pricing policy in museums remains limited, resulting in museum decision-makers lack the necessary understanding of how to customize their admission pricing policy, and researchers the foundation for advancing knowledge on the topic. To address these issues, we draw on a well-established development method to build a taxonomy, which involved synthesising the literature on the admission pricing policy of museums, analysing the characteristics of the admission pricing policy of 149 museums, and creating a cluster analysis for 117 museums located in the same region. The analysis yielded three distinct clusters (namely, free admission pricing policy, simple admission pricing policy, comprehensive admission pricing policy). Our work supports practitioners by showing them different options for structuring an admission pricing policy, while providing researchers with a foundation for further investigating museums’ admission pricing policies.

KEYWORDS:

• Museum
• admission pricing policy
• taxonomy
• cluster analysis

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research for the research conducted for this submission.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Submission

We can confirm that this is an original submission that has not been published previously and that is not currently under review at any other publication outlet.

Notes

1. We exclude all characteristics that start with ‘no’ for further explanation, as these all indicate that the respective sub-dimension is not priced separately, or that the corresponding service is unavailable.

2. We note that museums with free admission were excluded in the calculation to allow for a more meaningful interpretation. In this way, the percentages show how many museums have used the respective characteristic if it has charged a price at all.

3. We note that characteristics that start with a ‘no’ have been excluded in the figure, but not in the calculation, for a faster and easier interpretation at a glance. The values left out always result from the remaining amount to 100% within a category.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research under Grant [01UG1917]. The responsibility for the content of this presentation lies with the authors.

Notes on contributors

Maike Althaus

Maike Althaus is a graduate research assistant and a PhD student at the Chair of Business Information Systems, esp. Digital Markets at Paderborn University in Paderborn, Germany. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and Economics and a Master’s degree in Management Information System. Her research focuses on platform economics and consumer behaviour on two-sided digital platforms. Her work was presented at the International Conference on Cultural Economics, among others.

Stefanie J. M. Mueller

Stefanie Mueller is a graduate research assistant and a PhD student at the Chair of Business Information Systems, esp. Digital Markets at Paderborn University in Paderborn, Germany. She holds a double Bachelor’s degree in Business Economics and Musicology from Martin-Luther-University of Halle-Wittenberg and a Master’s degree in Popular Music and Media from Paderborn University. Her research focuses on the effect of innovative pricing strategies on social participation as well as the economic viability of these pricing strategies for different cultural institutions. Her work was presented at the International Conference on Cultural Economics, among others.

Dennis Kundisch

Dennis Kundisch is professor of information systems and holds the Chair of Business Information Systems, esp. Digital Markets at Paderborn University, Germany. He received his doctoral degree and his habilitation from the University of Augsburg in 2002 and 2006, respectively. His research interests include economics of information systems, business modeling, platform economics, gamification, and e-learning. Dr. Kundisch’s work appeared in the Journal of Management Information Systems, Information Systems Research, Management Science and Journal of Strategic Information Systems, among others. He serves as Co-Editor of the Department ‘Economics of Information Systems’ at Business & Information Systems Engineering and as Director of the Center of Competence ‘Digital Business’ at the Software Innovation Campus Paderborn. He is author of more than 200 international scientific publications.