Rewarding policies in an asymmetric game for sustainable tourism

Tourism is a growing sector worldwide, but many popular destinations are facing sustain-ability problems due to excessive tourist flows and inappropriate behavior. In these areas, there is an urgent need to apply mechanisms to stimulate sustainable practices. This paper studies the most efficient strategy to incentivize sustainable tourism by using an asymmet-ric evolutionary game. We analyze the application of rewarding policies to the asymmetric game where tourists and stakeholders interact in a spatial lattice, and where tourists can also migrate. The incentives of the rewarding policies have an economic budget which can be allocated to tourists, to stakeholders, or to both sub-populations. The results show that an adaptive rewarding strategy, where the incentive budget changes over time to one or the other sub-population, is more effective than simple rewarding strategies that are exclu-sively focused on one sub-population. However, when the population density in the game decreases, rewarding just tourists becomes the most effective strategy.& COPY; 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ )

Automated summary

Tourism, a growing sector globally, is causing sustainability problems in popular destinations due to excessive tourist flows and inappropriate behavior. This paper explores the most efficient strategy for incentivizing sustainable tourism using an asymmetric evolutionary game. The study analyzes the application of rewarding policies to a spatial lattice where tourists and stakeholders interact, and tourists have mobility. Results indicate that an adaptive rewarding strategy, altering the incentive budget over time, is more effective than simple strategies focusing on one sub-population. However, rewarding tourists exclusively becomes the most effective strategy when population density decreases.