Public museums are facing increasing difficulties to cope with their business, the preservation of cultural heritage, due to tight budgetary policies undertaken everywhere. The idea that public funding has to be complemented by market oriented activities is contemporary commonly accepted. Market oriented activities means to allocate a fee to visitors, to raise some fund from sponsors, selling books, and other artistic articles.

The museum visitor is relatively better educated, better paid and more professional, than the non visitor in the population, DiMaggio (1991). This may enable the museum to allocate a fair fee and also to raise some funds using the visitor as a sponsor, appealing to philanthropy, since it is recognized that culture is a learning-by -consuming good, and those who consume it are the ones that praise it more, and are willing to pay for it. In this paper we test this proposition on two Lisbon museums: The Chiado Museum and the Ethnologic museum, using a survey on visitors willingness to pay performed in 1996.

Key words: Museum funding, fair price, Philanthropy, willingness to pay.

Carlos Pestana Barros