Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-03T11:47:18.856Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core

14 - Time and Preferences in Cultural Consumption

from PART FOUR - APPRECIATION AND RANKING

By
Marina Bianchi
Edited by
Michael Hutter  and
David Throsby
Marina Bianchi
Affiliation:
University of Cassino, Italy
Michael Hutter
Affiliation:
Witten/Herdecke University
David Throsby
Affiliation:
Macquarie University, Sydney
Get access

Summary

Introduction

Only recently has economic theory started to address the problem of cultural value and valuation when consumers' choices are involved. One reason for this lack of analysis is the ambiguity that surrounds, in economics, the relationship between the use-value and exchange-value, or price, of goods. This may sound a bit paradoxical, since in economics use-value, in the form of utility and preferences, has occupied a central role in explaining the determination of prices, inverting the previous paradigm of cost-based determination. Yet, since use-values imply an inextricable interaction of objective and subjective attributes of goods, analyzing them proved to be problematic and was left outside economics, in the realm of psychology, sociology, or medicine. For economists, choices freely made reveal the individual's reservation price and subjective utility with no need for further investigation, since basic preferences are deemed to be coherent and stable over time.

Utility, then, remains the main goal individual choices are intended to maximize, but, emptied of any real meaning, it bears no explanatory power in solving the complex interplay that runs between individual desires and constraints. Yet how use-values are created and modified in consumption, and how they interact with exchange-values, cannot be lost sight of if actual choices are to be understood. This is especially true when cultural values are at stake.

Recent analyses both within and outside economics have started to fill this gap, recovering an earlier forgotten tradition, in which use-value and individual motivations were central to choice; this is the eighteenth-century philosophical tradition of David Hume and Adam Smith.

Type
Chapter
Information
Beyond Price
Value in Culture, Economics, and the Arts
 , pp. 236 - 258
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Apter, M. J. 1992. The Dangerous Edge: The Psychology of Excitement. New York: The Free Press.Google Scholar
Apter, M. J., ed. 2001. Motivational Styles in Everyday Life: A Guide to Reversal Theory. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arnheim, R. 1969. Visual Thinking. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Arnheim, R. 1986. New Essays on the Psychology of Art. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Barkow, J. H., Cosmides, L., and Tooby, J., eds. 1992. The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Baumol, W. J., and Bowen, W. G.. 1966. Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma. New York: Twentieth Century Fund.Google Scholar
Becker, G. S. 1965. A Theory of the Allocation of Time. Economic Journal 75(299): 493–517.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Becker, G. S. 1976. The Economic Approach to Human Behaviour. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Becker, G. S. 1996. Accounting for Tastes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Becker, G. S., and Murphy, K.. 1988. A Theory of Rational Addiction. Journal of Political Economy 96:675–700.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benedikt, M. 1996. Complexity, Value, and the Psychological Postulates of Economics. Critical Review 10(4): 551–594.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benjamin, W. 1968. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In W. Benjamin, Illuminations (1936), 217–251. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.Google Scholar
Berlyne, D. E. 1971. Aesthetics and Psychobiology. New York: Appleton Century Crofts.Google Scholar
Berlyne, D. E., and Madsen, K. B., eds. 1973. Pleasure, Reward, Preference. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Besharov, G. 2005. The Outbreak of the Cost Disease: Baumol and Bowen's Founding of Cultural Economics. History of Political Economy 37(3): 413–430.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bianchi, M. 1998a. Consuming Novelty: Strategies for Producing Novelty in Consumption. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28(1): 3–18.Google Scholar
Bianchi, M. 1998b. Taste for Novelty and Novel Tastes: The Role of Human Agency in Consumption. In Bianchi, M., ed., The Active Consumer: Novelty and Surprise in Consumer Choice, 64–86. London and New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bianchi, M. 1999. Design and Efficiency: New Capabilities Embedded in New Products. In Earl, P. and Dow, S., eds., Knowledge and Economic Organization: Essays in Honour of Brian Loasby, Vol. 1, 119–138. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.Google Scholar
Bianchi, M. 2002. Novelty, Preferences, and Fashion: When Goods Are Unsettling. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 4:1–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bianchi, M. 2003. A Questioning Economist: Tibor Scitovsky's Attempt to Bring Joy into Economics. Journal of Economic Psychology 24:391–407.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brewer, J. 1997. The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Hammersmith: HarperCollins.Google Scholar
Budd, M. 1996. Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry and Music. London: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Caves, R. E. 2000. Creative Industries. Contracts between Art and Commerce. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Coulson, A. S. 2001. Cognitive Synergy. In M. J. Apter, ed. 2001, 229–250.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. 1975. Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.Google Scholar
Crowley, J. E. 2001. The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Crozier, W. R., and Chapman, A. J., eds. 1984. Cognitive Processes in the Perception of Art. Amsterdam: North Holland.Google Scholar
Cunningham, B., and Kennedy, M.. 1999. The Experience of Reading: Irish Historical Perspectives. Dublin: Library Association of Ireland.Google Scholar
Deci, E., and Flaste, R.. 1996. Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation. New York: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Deci, E. L., and Ryan, R. M., eds. 2002. Handbook of Self-Determination Research. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press.Google Scholar
Elster, J., and Skog, O.. 1999. Getting Hooked: Rationality and Addiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frederick, S., and G. Loewenstein. 1999. Hedonic Adaptation. In D. Kahneman et al. 1999, 302–329.
Frey, B. S., and A. Stutzer. 2004. Economic Consequences of Mispredicting Utility (mimeo). Zurich: University of Zurich.
Georgescu-Roegen, N. 1983. Herrmann Heinrich Gossen: His Life and Work in Historical Perspective. In H. H. Gossen (1854)1983, xi–cxlix.
Gershuny, J. 1988. Time, Technology, and the Informal Economy. In Pahl, R. E., ed., On Work: Historical, Comparative and Theoretical Approaches. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gossen, H. H. 1983. The Laws of Human Relations and the Rules of Human Action Derived Therefrom (1854). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Hawtrey, R. G. 1926. The Economic Problem. London: Longmans, Green.Google Scholar
Hutter, M. 2001. Efficiency, Viability and the New Rules of the Internet. European Journal of Law and Economics 11(1): 5–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herrnstein, R., and D. Prelec. 1992. Melioration. In G. Loewenstein and J. Elster 1992, 235–264.
Kahneman, D., Diener, E., and Schwarz, N., eds. 1999. Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Kaplan, S. 1992. Environmental Prefences in a Knowledge-Seeking, Knowledge-Using Organism. In J. H. Barkow et al. 1992, 581–598.
Kimmelman, M. 2003. The Saint. The New York Review of Books 20(11): 12–15.Google Scholar
Kubovy, M. 1999. On the Pleasures of the Mind. In D. Kahneman et al. 1999, 134–154.
Larkin, D., and Brooks, B. Pfeiffer, eds. 2000. Frank Lloyd Wright: The Masterworks. Milan: Rizzoli.Google Scholar
Linder, S. B. 1970. The Harried Leisure Class. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Loewenstein, G., and Elster, J., eds. 1992. Choice over Time. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Loewenstein, G., Read, D., and Baumeister, R., eds. 2003. Time and Decision: Economic and Psychological Perspectives on Intertemporal Choice. New York: Russell Sage.Google Scholar
Nell, V. 1988. Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nisticò, S. 2005. Consumption and Time in Economics: Prices and Quantities in a Temporary Equilibrium Perspective. Cambridge Journal of Economics 29:943–957.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Orians, G. H., and J. H. Heerwagen. 1992. Evolved Responses to Landscapes. In Barkow et al. 1992, 555–579.
Robinson, J. P., and Godbey, G.. 1997. Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar
Rozin, p. 1999. Preadaptation and the Puzzles and Properties of Pleasure. In D. Kahneman et al. 1999, 109–133.
Schor, J. 1992. The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Schor, J. 2000. Working Hours and Time Pressure: The Controversy about Trends in Time Use. In Figart, D. and Golden, L., eds., Working Time: International Trends, Theory and Policy, 73–86. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Scitovsky, T. 1972. What's Wrong with the Arts Is What's Wrong with Society. In T. Scitovsky 1986, 37–46.
Scitovsky, T. 1983. Subsidies for the Arts: The Economic Argument. In T. Scitovsky 1986, 149–159.
Scitovsky, T. 1985. How to Bring Joy into Economics. In T. Scitovsky 1986, 183–203.
Scitovsky, T. 1986. Human Desires and Economic Satisfaction. Essays on the Frontiers of Economics. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Scitovsky, T. 1992. The Joyless Economy: The Psychology of Human Satisfaction (1976), revised ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Scitovsky, T., and Scitovsky, A.. 1959. What Price Economic Progress?The Yale Review 49:95–110.Google Scholar
Segre, C. 1984. Teatro e Romanzo. Turin: Einaudi.Google Scholar
Skog, O. 1999. Rationality, Irrationality, and Addiction: Notes on Becker and Murphy's Theory of Addiction. In J. Elster and O. Skog, eds. 1999, 173–207.
Steedman, I. 2001. Consumption Takes Time: Implications for Economic Theory. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strotz, R. 1955–1956. Myopia and Inconsistency in Dynamic Utility Maximization. Review of Economic Studies 23:165–180.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thaler, R. H. 1991. Quasi Rational Economics. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Throsby, D. 2001. Economics and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Towse, R., ed. 1997. Baumol's Cost Disease: The Arts and Other Victims. Aldershot: Edward Elgar.Google Scholar
Woodmansee, M. 1994. The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics.New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×