Attendance to cultural events and spousal influences: the Italian case

In cultural consumption it is quite reasonable to expect that the formation and the evolution of preferences, and the related individual choice behaviour, is affected by various interactions within families, peer and other social groups. Our investigation focuses on a specific form of “indirect” interaction effect, that is the reciprocal influence that a married person’s preferences and characteristics can have on the cultural consumption of her/his partner. Using the last two available nationwide cross-section datasets on the leisure activities of the Italian population (ISTAT, 1995 and 2000), we estimate the mutual influence of spouses’s educational and cultural background, besides other factors, on the consumption of three kinds of cultural activities, namely museum/exhibition, theatre, and opera and classical music concerts.