The cognitive objective of the study is to assess the importance of the marketing of tourist destinations relating to sustainable tourism as an element of their image in tourists’ decisions on choosing a destination. Due to the complexity of this phenomenon that emerges from individual attributes of tourists and destinations, individual interactions and understanding of human behavior, as well as lack of available data to evaluate the importance of a specific marketing message on tourists’ decisions, the study used multi-agent simulations to answer the research question: how do the characteristics of sustainable tourism reflected in the image of tourist destinations affect the decision to visit a particular destination. The methodological objective is to determine the feasibility of applying simulations using agent-based modeling (ABM) to discover the rules and behavioral patterns of tourists being recipients of the marketing of tourist destinations, considering a wide variety of decision rules. The system architecture was developed for the study based on several virtual agents, each with its own objective function and characterized by a set of personality traits, specific vulnerability to external factors, etc., forming the determinants of the decision-making process. As a result of such modeling, new knowledge was acquired to assess the importance of sustainable tourism characteristics reflected in the image of tourist destinations in shaping the tourists’ behavior—their choice of a specific tourist destination.

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Agent-Based Modeling Study on Tourists’ Decisions upon the Sustainable Tourism Image of Tourist Destinations

  • Justyna Majewska,
  • Agnieszka Niezgoda,
  • Szymon Truskolaski

摘要

The cognitive objective of the study is to assess the importance of the marketing of tourist destinations relating to sustainable tourism as an element of their image in tourists’ decisions on choosing a destination. Due to the complexity of this phenomenon that emerges from individual attributes of tourists and destinations, individual interactions and understanding of human behavior, as well as lack of available data to evaluate the importance of a specific marketing message on tourists’ decisions, the study used multi-agent simulations to answer the research question: how do the characteristics of sustainable tourism reflected in the image of tourist destinations affect the decision to visit a particular destination. The methodological objective is to determine the feasibility of applying simulations using agent-based modeling (ABM) to discover the rules and behavioral patterns of tourists being recipients of the marketing of tourist destinations, considering a wide variety of decision rules. The system architecture was developed for the study based on several virtual agents, each with its own objective function and characterized by a set of personality traits, specific vulnerability to external factors, etc., forming the determinants of the decision-making process. As a result of such modeling, new knowledge was acquired to assess the importance of sustainable tourism characteristics reflected in the image of tourist destinations in shaping the tourists’ behavior—their choice of a specific tourist destination.