This chapter presents my theory of seven cultural value orientations and applies it to understanding relations of culture to significant societal phenomena. The first section explicates my conception of culture – a conception of the normative value system that underlies social practices and...

This chapter surveys the recent economic literature on the relationships between globalization and cultural diversity. We first review the different channels through which international integration interacts with cultural diversity across individuals, communities, and nations. We then present...

The role of media – whether television, newspapers, radio, or the Internet – in supplying the ideas that shape our viewpoints and cultures is such that the dangers that may accompany concentrations of ownership in this sector are well recognized. Ownership patterns affect not only pluralism,...

Copyright protection grants creators monopolies – with their attendant harms – in order to provide incentives for continued creation. File sharing, which exploded with Napster’s appearance in 1999, effectively weakened copyright protection. Researchers have documented depressing effects of...

This chapter is a survey on the economics of blockbusters and bestsellers in popular entertainment and culture, with a particular focus on empirical methods and applications to movies, music, and books. We first survey various conceptual models on the economics of superstars and the...

This chapter briefly defines cultural heritage, before considering the relative merits of stated preference methods in relation to revealed preference in deriving economic values for cultural goods. Section 7.2 outlines the distinction between contingent valuation (CV) and discrete choice...

In this chapter I survey the kinds of value that music can have, or the variety of ways in which music can be valued, and the relationships and correlations among those values or ways of valuing. First and foremost is music’s musical value, or the value of music as music, which is a species of...

An aesthetic experience with visual art and the resulting perceived ‘beauty’ of it depend on a complex interaction among characteristics of the art object, the observer, and the physical, social, and historical contexts in which the experience takes place. Experimental aesthetics is devoted...

This chapter examines creative genius in the three most prominent domains of artistic achievement: literature, music, and the visual arts. Treatment begins with the definition of artistic genius in terms of achieved eminence, with special attention to the measurement issues (i.e. magnitude of...