Assessing the Economic Value of Cultural Heritage Site: A Case of the

Kekayon Puppet Museum in Yogyakarta

Endah Saptutyningsih

and Pandhu Nugroho Yoga Pamungkas

Faculty of Economics and Business, Universitas Muhammadiyah Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Keywords:

willingness to pay; contingent valuation method; cultural tourism; heritage tourism; museum

Abstract:

Some museums in Indonesia uphold the same mission, namely in the efforts to preserve culture in Indonesia.

As part of a cultural preservation, the Kekayon Puppet Museum Yogyakarta educate visitors about Javanese

culture through puppet. This study estimates the economic value of a cultural heritage site by investigating

visitors’ willingness to pay (WTP) for preserving the cultural heritage by visiting the museum. Using a lo-

gistic regression, we tested the determinants of visitors’ WTP. The results indicate that the visitors contribute

less by entrance fee payment. The average WTP value were IDR12,000 (USD 0.83). There are 81.39 percent

of respondents willing to contribute. This indicates that most of the visitors had a low contribution for the

Museum. This study contributes to the museum administrators, especially cultural heritage museums by iden-

tifying the value of visitor’s WTP and the determinants of WTP for visiting the museum, so they can promote

the importance of cultural heritage tourism and improve the facilities of the museum.

1 INTRODUCTION

The existence of a museum is needed for the com-

munities. The museums has been the main repository

of storing objects and cultural and educational relics

of a country. The economics research ﬁeld is quite

useful, for example in estimating the value of visitors

at their place of visit by using contingent valuation

(Johnson and Thomas, 1998). The logistic regression

could be employed to explore whether early exposure

to the arts of inﬂuence participation as adults. The

initial exposure resulted in later participation and that

the effects of exposure seemed to be strongest in the

years before and after adolescence (Gray, 1998).

This study aimed at identifying the factors had

impact on willingness to pay of visitors to visit mu-

seum. In this study, we used Kekayon Puppet Mu-

seum (Museum Wayang Kekayon) Yogyakarta as the

object. The tourism potential in Yogyakarta does not

only rely on the potential of nature and culture that

is very amazing, but also presents the potential of

historical tourism and cultural reserves that are very

interesting to visit. One tourist attraction that has a

high historical value is the museum. The Museum

is a permanent non-proﬁt institution in providing ser-

vices to the community and development, open to the

public who receive, maintain, research, deliver and

exhibit for the purpose of learning, education and sat-

isfaction, facts about humans and their environment

(ICOM, 2007). Some museums in Indonesia uphold

the same mission, namely in the efforts to preserve

culture in Indonesia. The Kekayon Puppet Museum

Yogyakarta is also part of a cultural preservation mis-

sion through education of tourists about Javanese cul-

ture through puppet (wayang). As a cultural heritage,

the museum have characteristics of public goods, and

therefore non-market valuation techniques can be em-

ployed for assessment. The most important valuation

method is contingent valuation (CV) method (Ready,

2002).

Most of the CV methods have applied to assess

goods and environmental beneﬁts, and only a few

studies have applied to non-proﬁt cultural organiza-

tions. Most of these studies have directed at gener-

ally supported cultural activities. Some CV studies

related to culture (Throsby et al., 1983) (Morrison and

Westi, 1986) (Martin, 1994) (Hansen, 1997). Still few

CV studies have conducted on the value of culture (or

non-proﬁt cultural organizations). For ﬁlling this gap,

this study would estimate the economic value of cul-

tural heritage site, namely The Kekayon Puppet Mu-

seum Yogyakarta using CV method. By logistic re-

gression, this study examined the impact of sociode-

mographic, travel cost, distance, facilities, etc. had

impact on WTP visitors to visit the museum.

230

Saptutyningsih, E. and Pamungkas, P.

Assessing the Economic Value of Cultural Heritage Site: A Case of the Kekayon Puppet Museum in Yogyakarta.

DOI: 10.5220/0009867702300234

In Proceedings of the International Conference on Creative Economics, Tourism and Information Management (ICCETIM 2019) - Creativity and Innovation Developments for Global

Competitiveness and Sustainability, pages 230-234

ISBN: 978-989-758-451-0

2 THE KEKAYON PUPPET

MUSEUM YOGYAKARTA

The Kekayon Puppet Museum is a private museum

that managed by the Kekayon Social Foundation and

it was established since July 23, 1991. The museum

is also an ofﬁcial member part of the Museum of the

Musyawarah Museum or Barahmus. It began fully

operated on June 17, 1992. As one of the museums in

Indonesia that participated in storing and exhibiting

puppets, the Kekayon Puppet Museum not become

the main destination of tourists, both domestic and

foreign tourists yet.

Based on data from tourist visits to the Kekayon

Puppet Museum in recent years, there have been ﬂuc-

tuations in the number of tourist visits to the Kekayon

Puppet Museum in the last 3 years through data from

the Yogyakarta Special Region Tourism Ofﬁce. The

Kekayon Puppet Museum. The Kekayon Puppet Mu-

seum is not included in the top 10 list of 31 museums

yet. In 2017, the De Mata Art Museum had the high-

est total visitors of 613,812 tourists and Affandi Mu-

seum had the lowest total visitors, which was 19,148.

Tourists visiting the Special Region of Yogyakarta

still choose to visit other museums rather than visiting

the Kekayon Puppet Museum. Of course, with vari-

ous kinds of promotional efforts or improvements to

facilities such as making more attractive puppet dis-

plays and other vehicles that are able to attract visi-

tors to come in the next few years it is expected that

the total number of tourist visits at the Kekayon Pup-

pet Museum increases.

3 METHODOLOGY

3.1 Study Site

This study conducted in the Kekayon Puppet Mu-

seum. The Kekayon Puppet Museum Yogyakarta is

also part of a cultural preservation mission through

education of tourists about Javanese culture through

puppet (wayang). The museum has more than 5,000

several awards related to the quality of the facili-

ties provided, namely two national awards from the

Roaming Community as a Nomination Museum for

Local Culture Wisdom in 2016 and Nomination of

Friendly Museum in 2017.

3.2 Sampling Procedure

The sampling method in this study used convenience

sampling technique. With convenience sampling

techniques researchers can save in terms of time and

costs and sampling respondents easily measured then

usually very helpful and want to be invited to coop-

erate. The use of this sampling method is very ap-

propriate for this type of research with groups that

focused and explorative research to ﬁnd ideas or ini-

tial testing of a hypothesis. We surveyed the visitors

who are willing to provide information needed by re-

searchers through questionnaires distributed, and in-

terviews conducted to obtain information directly or

indirectly. The required sample size for the surveys

was determined by the Slovin formula. We examined

a total of 172 respondents who visit The Kekayon

Puppet Museum.

3.3 Survey Design and Administration

We surveyed visitors in the study site to investigate

their support for improving The Kekayon Puppet Mu-

seum. Their support were measured they willing or

not to provide ﬁnancial support for improving the

Kekayon Puppet Museum by the entrance fee pay-

ment. These identiﬁed the visitors who care or not

about the cultural heritage site. In order to identify the

amount of entrance fee for the museum, we conducted

a focus group discussion with 20 visitors knowledge-

able about the topic. In the discussion, we utilized

the contingent valuation method that constructed a

hypothetical market to measure participants’ willing-

ness to pay for a certain change in sites (Mazzanti,

2003)(Sanz et al., 2003)(Bedate et al., 2004). Based

on bids above IDR 5,000 (USD 0.36), results of a

single bound study showed that the informed visitors

were willing to pay of IDR 12,000 (USD 0.83) at av-

erage for visiting the museum. This value indicate

the economic value of the museum from the point of

view of informed visitors. It could distinguish visitors

with sufﬁcient ﬁnancial support for the museum from

those without. Based on this estimation, we designed

a question to ﬁnd out whether participants would will-

ing or not willing to pay IDR 12,000 (USD 0.83) for

the entrance fee.

3.4 Data Analysis

The researcher applied a single dichotomous choice

method tied to two possible respondent answers

namely ”yes” or ”no”. The dichotomous choice

method best uses the Contingent Valuation Method

(CVM) approach because this method is closest to

market behavior when consumers will choose to buy

something or not at a certain price (Bateman et al.,

2002). Contingent Valuation is still widely used to as-

sess a tourist spot because the technique describes an

Assessing the Economic Value of Cultural Heritage Site: A Case of the Kekayon Puppet Museum in Yogyakarta

231

individual by generating value directly from an indi-

vidual through a survey (Mazzanti, 2003)(Sanz et al.,

2003)(Bedate et al., 2004).

We employed a logistic regression (Wang and El-

hag, 2007) to identity the impacts of the determi-

nants on visitors’ WTP for visiting The Kekayon Pup-

pet Museum. The dependent variable of the model

was the visitor’s WTP for for visiting The Kekayon

Puppet Museum, where 1 indicated their agreements

(they willing to pay as IDR 12,000) and 0 showed

their disagreements (they are not willing to pay as

IDR 12,000). The independent variables of the model

included the sociodemographic characteristics, visit

characteristics, and site characteristics (Figure 1).

The logistic regression of this study is

log(

1 − p

) = β + Σ

( j = 1)

βX

(k = 1)

Dki + e

(1)

log

(

(1 − p)) = β +β

INC +β

SEX + β

EDUC+

AGE + β

MARRIAGE + β

FREQ + β

TC+

FACILIT IES + β

DISTANCE+

SUBST ITUT ION + e (2)

where p is willingness to pay for the Kekayon

Puppet Museum (p = 1, if the respondent is willing to

pay; 1-p, if the respondent is not willing to pay); 1-p

is not willing to pay for visiting the Kekayon Puppet

Museum p / (p-1) = Odds Ratio (Risk); Xj is vector

of independent variable; Dk is vector of dummy vari-

able. αβi dan Yk=e is parameters that are assumed to

be random tool logistic functions.

4 RESULT AND DISCUSSION

The study results indicated that 81.4% of the respon-

dents (n=140) willing to pay for visiting The Kekayon

Puppet Museum, while the 18.6% (n=32) did not will-

ing.

Age has a positive signiﬁcant effect on willing-

ness to pay for visiting the museum. Most of the re-

spondents were young and active as students where

there was a special purpose in visiting the museum.

Respondents who have more than 30 years of age

have a greater willingness to pay because they al-

ready have a steady income. This research is in line

with the hypothesis of other research (Murzyn-Kupisz

and Działek, 2013). This in line with some previ-

ous studies (Nandagiri et al., 2015) (Tao et al., 2012)

(Van Sandt and Thilmany, 2016) (Chansina and Seen-

prachawong, 2017) (Adamu et al., 2015).

Figure 1: Regression Result.

Sex has a signiﬁcant effect on willingness to pay

to visit the museum. The results of this study are in

line with the results of other researches (Nandagiri

et al., 2015)(Van Sandt and Thilmany, 2016)(Fonseca

et al., 2010). The coefﬁcient value of the sex variable

is negative, which means that women have more WTP

than men to visit The Kekayon Puppet Museum.

The results of this study are supported by other re-

search (Priambodo and Suhartini, 2016) Marital sta-

tus has no signiﬁcant effect on the value of willing-

ness to pay for The Kekayon Puppet Museum. The

value of the variable coefﬁcient of marital status is

negative.

The results of the binary logistic regression test

show that there is a positive and signiﬁcant rela-

tionship between education with the willingness to

pay. It means that the higher level of education, the

higher the willingness to pay for visiting the museum.

In other words, knowledge from someone will in-

crease regarding awareness to maintain cultural her-

itage such as puppets and maintain the facilities from

the museum so that the possibility of the risk of pup-

pet damage will be smaller. A similar study who

investigated the Malaysian Museum regarding will-

ingness to pay for improving the quality of the mu-

seum facilities’ improvement (Fadhil et al., 2017),

The study also mentions that if the longer years of

schooling, the higher willingness to pay for the im-

provement. Some previous studies found the effect of

education on WTP (Nandagiri et al., 2015) (Adamu

et al., 2015) (Fonseca et al., 2010) (Fadhil et al.,

2017) (Calleja et al., 2017). Income has a positive

and signiﬁcant inﬂuence on willingness to pay. This

indicates that the higher the income level of the re-

spondents, the higher the willingness to pay for ad-

mission to museums. The results of previous stud-

ies are also in line with this hypothesis carried out

by other studies (Nandagiri et al., 2015) (Tao et al.,

2012) (Van Sandt and Thilmany, 2016) (Chansina and

ICCETIM 2019 - International Conference on Creative Economics, Tourism Information Management

232

Seenprachawong, 2017) (Adamu et al., 2015)(Fon-

seca et al., 2010). Travel costs have a signiﬁcant pos-

itive effect on WTP to visit The Kekayon Puppet Mu-

seum. This indicates that when there was an increase

in travel costs, the willingness to pay from respon-

dents for the Kekayon Yogyakarta Puppet Museum

also increased. Some studies have found the effect of

travel cost on WTP of tourist attractions (Van Sandt

and Thilmany, 2016) (Lamsal et al., 2016).

From the binary logistic regression results show

that the visit frequency variable has no effect on

willingness to pay, The respondents who visited the

Kekayon Yogyakarta Puppet Museum were the ﬁrst

time for the majority. In other words, many re-

spondents just found out information about the the

Kekayon Puppet Museum with the main purpose of

coming to study. The majority of respondents are

young with status still students who do not have

a ﬁxed income or still rely on giving money from

parents. In other words, respondents visiting the

Kekayon Puppet Museum aimed at study and some

of them were for recreational purposes only.

The results of this study are in line with the re-

search conducted by other study (Rozikin, 2016). The

substitution has a signiﬁcant inﬂuence on the value

of willingness to pay to visit the museum. The co-

efﬁcient value of the substitution variable is negative

which indicates that if the respondent visits another

tourist spot, the willingness to pay visitors for repairs

to the facility will be lower. This negative relation-

ship between the substitution variable and the WTP

variable is due to the increasing number of respon-

dents visiting other tourist attractions will reduce the

allocation of visitors to the improvement of museum

facilities. This phenomenon occurs because visitors

have made travel plans and the Kekayon Puppet Mu-

seum is one of the tourist destinations but is not the

main goal of the respondents.

Distance has a signiﬁcant inﬂuence on repairing

facilities at the Kekayon Puppet Museum. This is in

line with other research (Lamsal et al., 2016). The

distance coefﬁcient has a negative sign, indicating that

if the visitor’s residence is further away to the mu-

seum, the willingness to pay visitors for visiting the

museum will be lower. The negative relationship be-

tween the distance variables with WTP variables in

this study is because the farther the distance that must

be taken will reduce the price of admission to the mu-

seum.

The results of this study are similar to the research

conducted other study (Murzyn-Kupisz and Działek,

2013). The facility variable has a signiﬁcant inﬂu-

ence on the willingness to pay to visit the museum

that will be used for repairing the facilities of the

Kekayon Puppet Museum. The facility variable co-

efﬁcient value is positive which indicate that if the

facilities provided by museum managers are getting

better, it will encourage the willingness to pay visi-

tors for visiting the museum will be higher. So that it

can be concluded that the facility variable has a posi-

tive and signiﬁcant inﬂuence on the increase in WTP.

5 CONCLUSION

The study examines the effect of some determinants

of WTP to visit the cultural heritage site. We sur-

veyed the visitors of the Kekayon Puppet Museum,

Yogyakarta which was one of the cultural heritage site

part of a cultural preservation mission through educa-

tion of tourists about Javanese culture through puppet

(wayang).

The results indicated that 81.4% of the respon-

dents (n=140) willing to pay for visiting the museum,

while the 18.6% (n=32) did not willing. Among

the sociodemographic characteristics, age, sex, edu-

cation and income have effect on WTP to visit the

museum. The travel cost and the facility of the mu-

seum had positive and signiﬁcant inﬂuence to WTP,

respectively. There were the negative effect of substi-

tution of another sites and distance from residence to

the museum to the WTP for visiting the museum.

The low WTP of visitors indicate a low interest

in visitors to cultural heritage tourism especially at

Kekayon Puppet Museum, Yogyakarta. These needs

to be concerned by the museum administrator to pro-

mote the importance of cultural heritage tourism.

They should improve the facilities and attractive spot

visits for visitors who have an interest in cultural

tourism. As one of the cultural heritage site in Yo-

gyakarta, the manager of the Kekayon Puppet Mu-

seum should be increase the facilities for higher ed-

ucation of visitor and an interesting attraction related

to the Javanese cultural.

The future research still needed to conﬁrm the de-

terminants of WTP to visit the museum, as cultural

heritage site in other provinces of Indonesia, as well

as other countries as these effects might change under

different social and cultural conditions. This expected

to increase cultural tourism in Indonesia, which is

known as a country with various ethnic groups that

are rich in culture.

Assessing the Economic Value of Cultural Heritage Site: A Case of the Kekayon Puppet Museum in Yogyakarta

233

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