A TOURIST BEHAVIOR MODEL SYSTEM WITH MULTI-FACETED DEPENDENCIES AND INTERACTIONS

Tourists’ travel decisions usually involve a number of choices that are made over time and across space. Since tourists face many aspects of c hoices and have to deal with spatial and temporal constraints, it is expected that there exi sts multi-faceted dependencies and interactions in tourist behavior. The term “depende nce” refers to the state that tourist’s one choice aspect is conditioned on another, while the term “interaction” means tourist’s two or more choice aspects are interacted with each other. Such dependencies and interactions have three facets, including dependencies and inter actions among different choice aspects; temporal dependencies and interactions; and social interactions. Aiming to gain a thorough understanding of tourist behavior, this study attem pts to build a model system, into which all the major choice aspects related to tourist beh avior are incorporated and multi-faceted dependencies and interactions are taken into accoun t. Co cretely speaking, this study will analyze tourism participation behavior by consideri ng the influence of various factors, including individual and household characteristics, social interactions and constraint effects; investigate tourist multi-stage choice pro cess, including two interrelated choice aspects of destination and travel party, and three interrelated choice aspects of tourism participation, destination choice, and travel mode choice; analyze tourist’s multi-destination choice with future dependence; re present tourism participation and tourism expenditure simultaneously; examine tourist s’ time allocation decisions on various activities during travel. Several modeling approaches are proposed in this st udy. Tourism participation choice is analyzed based on a Scobit model, which i n ludes a skewness parameter to relax the assumption made in binary logit model that the sensitivity of individuals to changes in explanatory variables is highest for those who have indifferent preferences over participation and non-participation. Focusing on th e interaction between travel party and destination, the latent class modeling approach is introduced into the nested logit modeling framework to simultaneously represent the heterogen eous nested choice structure. Three level nested logit model is adopted to jointly anal yze tourist’s three interrelated choice (whether to travel, destination choice, travel mode choice). The model of destination choice that incorporates future dependence is devel oped to represent the multi-destination choice in a tour trip. A discrete-continuous choice model is developed to represent tourists’ two interrelated choice aspects (i.e., tourism part icipation and expenditure) simultaneously. The multiple discrete-continuous extreme value (MDC EV) model is employed to represent tourist’s time use behavior with multiple activitie s. In total, this thesis consists of 8 chapters. Chapt er 1 describes the research background, problems, objective, methodologies, and expected contributions. Chapter 2 gives a review of existing studies about t rist behavior analysis. Firstly, studies regarding tourism participation behavior ar e reviewed. Then, research concerning tourist scheduling behavior is described, which inc ludes several dimensions: spatial choice, temporal choice, monetary expenditure, and social c ontexts. Next, studies about post-travel evaluation are summarized. Finally, a review of int egrated framework in tourist behavior studies is given. Chapter 3 introduces the data used in this study. T hree different types of data sets are used in this study. The first one comes from a web-based questionnaire survey conducted in Japan in April 2010. The survey includ ed very detailed information of individual’s tourism behavior in the year 2009 (e.g ., how many times they participated in tourism during the whole year, destination choice, timing, travel mode, travel party, duration of stay, expenditure for each trip) and in ividual characteristics (e.g., gender, age, occupation, education level, annual income, marital status, household composition, residential area, car ownership, etc.). This data i s used to analyze tourism participation behavior, destination choice, travel mode choice, a nd monetary expenditure. The second data was collected at 29 major tourism destinations in Kyusyu, Chugoku and Shikoku regions in the summer of 2002 based on a face-to-fa ce interview, which is used to analyze interrelated choices of destination and travel part y. The third dataset was collected in the prefecture of Tottori in 2007 based on an on-site i n rview, which provide very detailed information about tourists’ on-site behavior. This data is used to analyze tourists’ on-site travel pattern and time use behavior. Chapter 4 analyzes individual’s decision on whether or not to participate in tourism. In this chapter, individual’s choice of tourism par ticipation is studied based on a Scobit model, which includes a skewness parameter to relax the assumption made in binary logit model that the sensitivity of individuals to change s in explanatory variables is highest for those who have indifferent preferences over partici pation and non-participation. In addition, two psychological factors, namely, social interacti ons and constraint effects are incorporated into the model based on the theoretica l consideration in the existing literature. The empirical application is conducted using the da ta stemmed from a web survey conducted in Japan in 2010. Using this data the imp acts of several attributes on participation decisions in tourism are investigated . Chapter 5 deals with tourists’ multi-stage choices, which includes two parts. The first part aims to get a better understanding of he terogeneous interaction between destination and travel party choices in tourism. Fo r this purpose, this chapter attempts to simultaneously represent these two choices by integ ra in the nested logit model with the latent class modeling approach, which is used to ac c mmodate two types of nested model structures. The second part jointly analyzes touris t’s three interrelated choice (whether to travel, destination choice, travel mode choice) and examine the influences of state dependence as well as other factors on these three c oices. In this chapter, the joint choice of three components is analyzed using a nested logi t (NL) model, which includes three levels: the first level is tourism participation ch oice, the second one is destination choice and the third one is travel mode choice. The NL mod el incorporates the interaction between different choice dimensions with the help o f an inclusive value, which is the maximal utility of the alternatives in the choice s et of the lower level nest. To examine the influence of state dependence, lagged endogenous va riables are included into the model. Chapter 6 is concerned with interrelated choices un derlying tourist’s multi-destination behavior. A new destination choic e model is developed based on the concept of future dependence, which argues that cho ice of a destination during a tour is influenced by choices of other destinations that wi ll be visited later. The model is built within the universal (or mother) logit model framew ork and it is especially suitable to represent the choice behavior with many destination s, which are difficult to be represented using traditional nested logit model. The results o f analysis empirically confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed modeling approach, us ing a questionnaire survey data collected in Tottori Prefecture, Japan in 2007. It was also revealed the influential factors that affect the multi-destination choice behavior. Chapter 7 focuses on tourist resource allocation de cisions, which include both long-term and short-term aspects. The long-term dec ision concerns when to go for a travel, how long and how much to spend on a trip. The short -term decision mainly refers to the decisions during the travel (time and money allocat i n during travel). This chapter includes two parts. The first part investigates monthly tour ism expenditure behavior (long-term aspect). The second part analyzes tourist time allo cati n on on-site activities (short-term aspect). The existing research has a lot of problems in repr esenting tourism expenditure as a decision which is independent from the decision of participation in tourism. The former part of this chapter attempts to represent these tw o decisions simultaneously. This is done by developing a new type of discrete-continuous cho ice model which incorporates the correlation between these two decisions and represe nts them simultaneously. To describe the tourism participation, Scobit model is adopted, which includes a skewness parameter to relax the assumption made in the popular Logit and Probit models that the sensitivity of individuals to changes in explanatory variables is highest for those who have indifferent preferences over participation and non-participatio n. An empirical analysis is carried out using the data collected from a web-based survey co nducted in Japan in 2010. The results confirm the interaction between tourism participati on and expenditure. Furthermore, Scobit-based model is proved to be superior to Logi t-based model. Finally, influential factors affecting both tourism participation and ex p nditure are also examined. In the latter part of chapter 7, tourist’s time use b havior involving multiple activities is analyzed by using a multiple discrete -continuous extreme value (MDCEV) model. The MDCEV model is applied because it has se veral advantages over other existing time use models, including the joint representation of participation in multiple activities and the allocated time, diminishing marginal utilit ies (satiation effects), and different baseline utilities. Application analysis is carried out using a data collected from tourists in Japan. Influential factors related to time use in 7 activity categories are