Modelling Tourism Development: A Synthetic Approach

This paper produces an innovative model of tourism development by creatively amalgamating the framework of agglomeration economics with discrete choice and oligopolistic competition. Consumer choice is examined simultaneously from a dual perspective (discretely at the inter-resort level and continuously in the context of intra-resort consumption) to encapsulate systemic and probabilistic factors. In conjunction with the treatment of dynamic issues, the paper then performs a welfare analysis by comparing the spatio-temporal configuration under a social planner with the one of a decentralized regime. Finally, policy considerations and directions for future research and operationalization are drawn.