A new approach for assessing the probability of museum opening choices and its spatial continuity

In the literature, several approaches and methods were applied for studying the visitors' profile or the managerial performance and economic efficiency of the museums; however, none of them investigated the museums opening decisions. To this aim an innovative approach which combines multilevel multinomial ordered models and spatial correlation models, is introduced and some advances in logit data geostatistical modeling is proposed together with an extended form of regression kriging, called multilevel logit kriging. Thus, the variation of the probability of the museums opening decisions both at regional and provincial levels for some peculiar museums characteristics, as well as the effect of some specific regional/provincial key factors which might influence their regular/non regular opening are modeled, also with respect to different types of institution (private/public). The ISTAT microdata concerning the Italian survey on the museums and cultural institutions, will be considered. The empirical findings will provide worthy advices for the development of suitable management policies.