Development with sustainable tourism: tools in a game-theoretical policy kit

In this paper we begin with a definition of tourism sustainability derived from a typically anthropological and sociological idea, which is foreign to the thinking of the economists, though. This is the idea that tourism is the encounter of two populations, of hosts and guests. Though often further internally structured into communities, we will focus on homogenous populations for the sake of developing some simpler (and thus, of course, non-exhaustive) theoretic schemes of their interaction. Much of the implied complexity will be left out. The foregoing analysis reflects one of the ways economist may think about tourism, our inspiration being in the marriage of an evolutionary theory of population dynamics with a game theoretic approach. As a consequence of our proposed definition, a development path of sustainable tourism may (or may not) result from such interaction of heterogeneous populations. This depends as to whether the they share an interest in the sustainable exploitation of local, broadly defined environmental and cultural resources, or else their own interests are in conflict, instead, leading thus to their over-usage and, in the longer run, destruction. Interaction can be naturally (to an economist’s eye, at least) framed in simple and well known game theoretic settings, which, at the cost of certain behavioral assumptions, may still help us to clarify under what conditions a given social outcome may result. As is well known, a key condition for the latter, is the possibility of playing once or repeating the strategic interaction. It is this condition that with tourism takes up a peculiar aspect. The same setting permits to introduce policy considerations going beyond the conventional short run or demand oriented view of tourism development.