Abstract
Nature-based tourism (NBT) is vulnerable to a rapid increase in visitors because natural resources are often open access. Market failure caused by over-exploitation of natural resources is an example of social dilemmas in common-pool resource systems. Game theory, which describes people’s decision making under conflicts, has been applied to the analysis of social dilemmas in NBT. However, previous studies use non-cooperative games assuming individualistic players and discuss the emergence of social dilemmas only in a limited situation. Here, we demonstrate, by developing a two-player non-cooperative game of wildlife viewing, that the traditional game-theoretic approach fails to find social dilemmas. By analysing the competition between tour operators (players) with different social value orientations (SVOs), we found that concentration of tours becomes a Pareto-inefficient Nash equilibrium (PINE) when both players are competitive. Whether the wildlife-viewing market is a Prisoner’s dilemma depends on players’ SVOs. Furthermore, we found that fair punishment on competitive players promotes rather than suppresses the emergence of PINE. Our results suggest that the diversity of SVOs is an essential factor in understanding social dilemmas in NBT.
Highlights
Tourism demand has been rapidly increasing in recent years
This paper focuses on the tourism dilemma in wildlife viewing[28,29,30,31], which is a popular form of Nature-based tourism (NBT)
We identify the combinations of parameters that produce Pareto-inefficient Nash equilibria (PINE) as the solutions in the Wildlife-Viewing game (WVG)
Summary
Tourism demand has been rapidly increasing in recent years. According to the World Travel and Tourism Council[1], travel and tourism contributed USD 8,272 billion (at 2017 constant prices and exchange rates) to world GDP in 2017. Game theory is not widely applied to NBT, but several studies discuss tourism dilemmas based on non-cooperative games. Pirotta and Lusseau[17] develop an agent-based model of wildlife viewing and analyse the interactions of tour operators, visitors, and animals. By numerical simulation, they evaluate the impacts of resource conservation policies (e.g. taxation, subsidies, and cap-and-trade mechanisms) on the profits of tour operators. Game-theoretic studies on NBT aim to evaluate the effects of resource conservation policies by developing mathematical models of tourism dilemmas. We represent the competition between tour operators by a two-player non-cooperative game and identify mathematical conditions under which the market falls into social dilemmas.
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