Incentive Mechanism Of Intangible Cultural Heritage Inheritance Research

For a very long time, we have ignored the protection of intangible cultural heritage, and now we begin to pay attention to it, only to find that there are many challenges in the inheritance of intangible cultural heritage. Some heritages have no inheritors, and some are faced with destructed original environment. Therefore, we need different protection measures based on the specific conditions. In this paper, the author classifies the ways of inheriting the heritages, identifies the difficulties based on the classification and designs targeted incentive mechanism according to different theories of economics.The reason to protect the intangible cultural heritages not only lies in their economic value, but also and more importantly, their spiritual and social value. The intangible cultural heritage represents a cultural identity. However, those with better inheritance are often the ones with higher economic values while those with rich spiritual and social value but less economic value are more likely to die out and therefore need more attention and protection for their inheritance.At present, there are mainly two ways to classify the intangible cultural heritage: one is based on the administrative institutions that acknowledge the heritage, like world intangible cultural heritage, national-level, provincial-level, municipal-level and county-level; the other is based on the content of the heritage, such as folk literature, traditional music, traditional dance and traditional play. However, such kind of classification does little help to identify the property features of the intangible cultural heritages. Therefore, from the perspective of ways of inheritance, the intangible cultural heritages can be classified into individual inheritance (family inheritance or master-apprentice inheritance) and community inheritance so as to distinguish their property features as well as the difficulties in inheritance and try to resort to different theories of economics to overcome the difficulties.For individual inheritance, the major problem is often the break off of the continuation. The heritage is passed orally, which is quite fragile when facing economic pressure. The potential inheritors cannot fully committed to learning the technique when confronting with problems like furthering study, finding a job, buying a house, getting married and raising children. But the inheritance of most of the heritages requires persistent and long-time training, so the heritages may disappear due to lack of successors. Based on the preference formation theory, this problem can be solved by shaping the preferences of the major consumers and the inheritors. On one hand, we can make more people love and consume the heritages to improve the economic conditions of the inheritors. On the other hand, we can make people more motivated to engage in the inheritance and innovation of intangible cultural heritage.For community inheritance, the major difficulty results from the joint ownership of the intangible cultural heritage. It is a public resource within a community, so all the. community members can make profits through consumption of the heritage. However, the resource is not inclusive and competitive, so inevitably there will be some free riders who expects others to make more efforts during the process of protection and inheritance. Under such circumstances, autonomous organizations such as professional co-operatives and social groups should be given a full play. During the operation, we should pay attention to establishment of institutions, the credibility of commitment, mutual supervision and punishment. We should clarify ownership of the property, formulate the rules based on the principle that reward must be in proportion to efforts and in the spirit of just, fairness and openness. More individuals should be invited to the process of rulemaking.At last, if it doesn’t go well in the process of preference formation and the crisis of inheritance cannot be fully resolved through self-governance, government should step in to protect the intangible cultural heritages. Then, the government, as an agent, will face the problem of incomplete information, so the author introduces the principal-agent model to solve the problems of hidden efforts and hidden costs of the protection.