Better an egg today than a hen tomorrow: On the implications of deaccess policies on donations to museums

Severe budget cuts in the cultural sectors of many countries have spurred disparate suggestions for alternative sources available to public institutions. Deaccessioning may contribute to guarantee the survival of cultural institutions without serious negative impacts on the fruition of cultural goods. This paper addresses the consequences of a widespread deaccessioning on in-kind bequests to museums, by developing a sequential game with incomplete information. We look at the interactions between a donor and a museum. The latter could be either institutionally committed not to sale its collection, or free to sell part of its art endowment. Our main results show that when deaccessioning is allowed, contributions to museums of both types may decrease. Interestingly, public grants to museums cause a negative externality to the committed museum, which experiences a reduction in donations. Results provide intuitions also for the widespread resistance to deaccessioning of public museum directors, for their efforts to enforce common regulation, and also for the proliferation of private art museums.