Re: [Fwd: a non-profit oddity]

[Alex T Tabarrok]

Fabio wrote "Movie studios owners only care about profits, while opera owners consume both money and art." Quite right. You can find a general model of this sort of behaviour with implications in:

Cowen, Tyler and Alexander Tabarrok. 2000. A Economic Theory of Avant-Garde and Popular Art, or High and Low Culture. Southern Economic Journal 67(2): 232-253.


ABSTRACT: Artists face choices between the pecuniary benefits of
selling to the market and the non-pecuniary benefits of creating to
please their own tastes. We examine how changes in wages, lump sum
income, and capital-labor ratios affect the artist's pursuit of
self-satisfaction versus market sales. Using our model of labor supply
as a guide, we consider the economic forces behind the high/low culture
split, why some artistic media offer greater scope for the avant-garde
than others, why so many artists dislike the market, and how economic
growth and taxation affect the quantity and form of different kinds of
art.

--
Alexander Tabarrok Department of Economics, MSN 1D3 George Mason University Fairfax, VA, 22030 Tel. 703-993-2314
and
Director of Research The Independent Institute 100 Swan Way Oakland, CA, 94621 Tel. 510-632-1366