Et?

Nowadays consumers’ time might have become more valuable than ever before. Our daily lives are full of a wide range of activities, while simultaneously leaving many people with a feeling that they have too little time. Thus, besides other factors such as price, income and the price of other goods, the availability of time might influence peoples’ demand for goods and services. This research has tried to investigate the influence of the factor time on the demand for the performing arts. This is done in order to create a model for the time elasticity of the demand for the performing arts. Investigating the concept of time is important, because it sheds new light on how peoples’ demand for goods and services is constructed. Venues and performing art groups can take this into consideration while working on their future programming. The concept of time itself can be divided into two; on the one hand the demand side, the time budget, while on the other hand the supply side, referred to as the time costs. The time budget includes the concepts of opportunity costs, foregone earnings and productive consumption, while the time costs are indicated by the transaction costs, the duration of the performance, travel time and the moment in time. The Holland Festival (2005-2009) is taken as a case study for the practical research and the focus is upon the influence of the duration of the performance on the number of visitors for these years. The former is taken as the independent variable, the latter as the dependent variable. Different than expected, the results indicated that the duration of the performance had a positive influence on the number of tickets sold. This implies that longer performances are visited by more people. For 2008, this influence was even elastic (1.17), meaning that an increase of the duration with 1 % would result in an increase of the number of visitors with 1.17% . Nonetheless, the results of this research do not imply that all performances should be made longer to increase the number of visitors, but it might be wise for venues and performing groups to pay attention to the influence the factor time might have on their attendance numbers. Furthermore, it is interesting that the results state the opposite from previously published literature. However, the fact that the case study was a festival and other variables were set ceteris paribus, one must realize that further research must be done in order to confirm what came out of this research.