Cultural identity and willingness to protect and preserve art

The aim of this paper is to analyse the willingness to pay of art-goers for the protection and preservation of cultural artefacts. To this purpose, a discrete choice experiment approach is employed. The experiment took place in 2011 during a major exhibition dedicated to the artist Costantino Nivola (1911-1988). His works, especially those based on the novel sand-casting technique, are known worldwide and many of them were produced after he moved from Sardinia (Italy) to the United States (where he lived from 1939 to his death in 1988). Over this period he never cut his ties with his native land. As a result, both the American and the Sardinian culture affect and show up in his works. In this context, the discrete choice experiments allowed us to estimate not only the price that people are prepared to pay for the security of Nivola's artefacts but also the contribution of non-market components, such as identity, to preserve those objects. Accounting for heterogeneity, the empirical findings show that among visitors there is a substantial willingness to partially cover the cost of preserving the cultural heritage, with significant differences related to the characteristics of the collections considered.