Modelling tourists' decisionmaking from a cross-cultural perspective

Abstract

Decision-making models are widely used tools developed to study how agents select their preferred features on conflictive alternatives. Despite the importance given to individual preferences in decision-making, cognitive biases, emotions or psychological influences were not studied in the realm of economics till the 70s, with rise of behavioural economics. However, contextual factors like culture from the field of social psychology were less studied in the area of economics. To explore the influence of culture on decision-making, we use the case of tourism, where the primary hypothesis is that culture affects decision-making. Thus, the aim of the thesis is to merge the knowledge from decision-making, behavioural economics and social-psychology in a tourism context to check if culture affect decision-making, and how.