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Visits to Chinese museums have grown eightfold between 1995 and 2016. Growth in museum expenditure and space has contributed to most of the increase in visits, although the free admission policy that was rolled out in 2008 also had a significant impact. Demand factors have not had a major impact on museum visit growth with the possible exception of the increase in urban population. Museum demand exhibits decreasing returns in museum quality and museum space but constant return to scale in both. Finally, the government’s move to free admission, as well as the growth rates in museum space and expenditure, is broadly consistent with the objective of maximizing visits.

Concert tickets can be sold at the same price or at different prices that reflect different seating categories. Price discrimination generates about 5% greater revenues than single-price ticketing. The return to price discrimination is higher in markets with greater demand heterogeneity, as predicted by price discrimination theory. The return to an increase from three to four concert seat categories is roughly half that of an increase from one to two.

A large number of brokers and scalpers resell a significant fraction of event tickets at substantial markups and they manage to do so despite the fact that promoters and ticketing agencies do not support resell for profits and often attempt to block secondary market. Why can't promoters capture the profits from secondary markets or at least deter brokers from doing so? I present a simple explanation that borrows from the literature on airline ticket pricing and draw parallels with that literature. I review some evidence consistent with this explanation.

The fair price ticketing curse occurs when an event organizer sells tickets at prices that do not correspond to underlying demand conditions and does not want resellers to profit from resale opportunities. The curse has been exacerbated with the advent of online ticketing. The challenge is to facilitate genuine ticket exchange while eliminating resale for profit. None of the attempted public or private solutions solve the problem. We propose a simple mechanism, identify a key set of necessary conditions for it to work, and discuss recent technological innovations that facilitate its implementation.

Quantity surcharges occur when retailers carry a product in two sizes and offer a promotion on the small size: the large size then costs more per unit than the small one. When quantity surcharges occur, sales of the large size decline only slightly even though the same quantity can be purchased for less. We document this behavior in two data sets and four product categories. It is consistent with the notion of passive shoppers found in the industrial organization literature and the notion of rational inattention in macroeconomics. We discuss implications for consumer decision making, demand estimation, and firm pricing.

The uniform pricing puzzle for vertically differentiated media and entertainment products (movies, books, music, mobile apps, etc.) is that a firm with market power sells high- and low-quality products at the same price even though quality is perfectly observable and price adjustments are not costly. We resolve this puzzle by assuming that consumers have an uncertain taste for quality and accounting for consumer loss aversion in monetary and consumption utilities. The novelty of our approach is that the so-called reference transaction is endogenously set as part of a \"personal equilibrium\" and is based only on past purchases of same-quality products.

We strongly reject the hypothesis of theater design revenue neutrality using a large dataset of Chinese theaters. Instead, we find large increasing returns in revenue from adding auditoria up to 9 auditoria, close to constant returns from adding seats up to an intermediate seating capacity of about 120 seats, beyond which decreasing returns prevail, and a large revenue premium to having an Imax auditorium. These revenue gains are largely due to differences in capacity utilization rates, and to a lower extent to differences in screening intensity (more showings per screen), while price differences play a negligible role. We discuss various mechanisms that may rationalize deviations from theater design neutrality. We conclude that a large fraction of Chinese theaters have too few auditoria and too many seats per auditorium, although this is less so for recently built ones. These violations of profit maximization are likely explained by the long-term, irreversible, and risky nature of theater design choices.

We study the socioeconomic determinants of cultural participation in thirteen major Chinese cities for a broad range of indicators that cover highbrow and popular cultures. Consistent with previous studies from high-income countries, we find strong support for the elitism hypothesis: education and income increase participation in a broad range of cultural activities. There are also some exceptions. Interestingly, we also find a U-shaped relation between participation and city development for free and publicly supplied culture. Moreover, the impact of education, and to some extent also income, is weaker in richer cities. These findings contribute to understanding China’s key policy objective of promoting equal access to culture.