Employing Travel Costs to Compare the Use Value of Competing Cultural Organizations

Since recently, a number of studies have applied non-market valuation techniques to measure the value of cultural goods. All studies are single case applications and rely mostly on stated preferences, such as contingent valuation techniques. We compare the relative value of multiple, competing goods and show how revealed preferences, in particular travel costs, may be used for this. In addition, we account for heterogeneity. Using a unique transaction database with the visiting behavior of 80,821 Museum Cardholders to 108 Dutch museums, we propose a latent class application of a logit model to account for the different distances of museums to the population and for differences in willingness-to-travel.