基于实验人文地理学的旅游目的地选择行为研究

Exploring the Spatial Behavior of Tourist Destination Selection:A Case Study of the Computer-aided Experimental Human Geography

文章基于实验经济学和计算机实验人文地理学的方法思想,以旅游目的地选择行为研究为案例。首先设定研究目标,进而提出了实验的前提假设。采用地理信息科学和网络服务技术,构建旅游目的地选择行为实验平台,展开实例研究,研究结果表明:(1)进行大尺度旅游目的地选择时,被试者表现出不断追求旅游效益最大化这一目标,且与旅游目的地的资源类型无关。(2)被试者经过一定实验学习后,总体上呈现出不断追求个人收益最大化的趋势。然而,有些情况下,也可能出现决策失误。案例研究的成功进一步表明,实验人文地理学思想方法和研究手段对于典型人文地理学问题进行研究是可行的。文章为正在发展的实验人文地理学发展提供了案例指导。

This paper aims to explore the spatial behavior of tourist destination choice in a well designed virtual geographic environment, and also to test the possibility of experimental human geography. Geography has long been recognized as an observational discipline rather than an experimental science. However, along with the development of geographic information science, the computer-aided experimental human geography has been proposed to be a new methodology in geographic research. Experimental human geography aims to reproduce spatial behaviors of human beings in an information-rich virtual geographic environment supported by computer and geographic technologies. Such experimental approaches have potentials in exploring various human-environment relationships. In social sciences, the experimental economics has been accepted as one of the mainstream methods in economic research, and has successfully applied in some decision-making behaviors under the social background with explicit or implicit rules. Inspired by the success of experimental economics, it is believed that experimental human geography will be developed as a new paradigm of geography. Given travel time and spendable money for travelers, and a number of tourist destinations in a geographic region, the proposed experiment focuses on the spatial behavior of tourist destination choice. We choose three typical tourist areas： 5 city tour （Shanghai, Hangzhou, Suzhou, Wuxi and Nanjing） in the Yangtze River Delta, Hunan tourist areas in central China, and Yunnan tourist areas in western China. Information was collected from all the 4A and 5A level scenic spots within the research areas that are considered travel destinations. For travelers, the assumptions are the ring travel mode, 7 days of travel time, 5000 Yuan of spendable money, and three types of transportations such as train, car driving and airline. The travelers are classified into different groups in terms of gender, age, income and education level. The experimental hypothesis is that the travelers will maximize their tourism profits. The collective spatial behavior of tourist destination choice is expected to be generalized by the computer-aided experiment. Based on the discussions above, we design a web-based virtual tourism system. Thirty volunteers are recruited to attend the experiment. There are two major findings from the experiment. First, when the subjects chose the tourist destinations within the three typical tourist areas, the subjects＇ space choice behavior indicated that they are trying to constantly pursuit of maximizing their tourism profits, and their spatial choice behavior features is nothing to do with the tourism destination resource type. Second, under the inspiration of incentive mechanisms, subjects are as much as possible to maximize their tourism profits through changing their tourism route, changing transportation mode and choosing more scenic spots. However, along with getting more and more experimental results, in some case, tourists＇ destination choices may cause their benefits decrease. The success of the experiment prototype system for tourist destination choice suggests that the computer-aided experimental geographic method is feasible for solving typical human geography problem. In short, the article provides case guidance for developing computer-aided experimental human geography.