Extract

The literature has drawn attention to controversial aspects of public intervention, regarding the blurriness of the boundaries of cultural heritage, the extent of market failure and the implementation of government support. This study focuses on the governance of cultural heritage rather than the initial questions concerning limits and rationale of state support. In particular, the analysis highlights characteristics of committee decision-making and of policy formation and implementation useful to predict and evaluate cultural heritage policies. The chapter is organized as follows. The next section highlights some basic problems concerning the aggregation of preferences. After that, we investigate essential issues addressed by the economic analysis of policymaking that will prove to be useful to interpret cultural policies. Subsequent section contains a model of mechanism design and implementation and applies this model to problem of decision making in heritage policy. The last section concludes with few additional comments.