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Modelling Internet Diffusion Across Tourism Sectors

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Applied Economics in the Digital Era

Abstract

This study investigates the Bass Diffusion model. Bass’ parameters of innovation (p) and imitation (q) help explain adoption, and the ratio of these parameters sheds insights on critical mass. This study compares the parameters p and q across 13 internet diffusion datasets in five tourism sectors across international, European and five national datasets. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) play an increasing role with tourists and tourism organisations. The data contain destination management organisations (Switzerland, Austria and Germany), tour operators (European and Swiss), accommodation providers (international chain hotels, Malaysian hotels, Swiss affiliated hotels and Swiss guest houses) and Swiss cable cars. This study also uses the Gamma/Shifted Gompertz model to incorporate heterogeneous adoption. Across the same datasets, tourism organisations showed heterogeneous adoption tendencies and the influence of critical mass. This exploratory research illustrates the usefulness of Bass’ parameters both as a foundation and to measure critical mass.

This chapter draws on a pedagogical explanation of Bass modelling of Swiss accommodation in (Scaglione, forthcoming), and a first draft of this paper presented at the Annual Conference of International Association of Scientific Experts in Tourism—AIEST 2012 held at Khon Kaen (Thailand).

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Correspondence to Miriam Scaglione .

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Appendix

Appendix

Cumulative series, Observed, estimated (one-step ahead) and forecasted for the last 24 months using Bass model for all sectors under study.

See Figs. 6.4, 6.5, 6.6, 6.7, 6.8, 6.9, 6.10, 6.11, 6.12, 6.13, 6.14, 6.15, and 6.16.

Fig. 6.4
figure 4

(Source Authors’ computation)

Swiss Destination Managements Organizations (DMOs)

Fig. 6.5
figure 5

(Source Authors’ computation)

Austrian DMOs

Fig. 6.6
figure 6

(Source Authors’ computation)

German DMOs

Fig. 6.7
figure 7

(Source Authors’ computation)

Swiss restaurants

Fig. 6.8
figure 8

(Source Authors’ computation)

Swiss cable cars companies

Fig. 6.9
figure 9

(Source Authors’ computation)

International hotel chains

Fig. 6.10
figure 10

(Source Authors’ computation)

European tour operators (TOs)

Fig. 6.11
figure 11

(Source Authors’ computation)

Malaysian hotels

Fig. 6.12
figure 12

(Source Authors’ computation)

Swiss non-affiliated hotels

Fig. 6.13
figure 13

(Source Authors’ computation)

Swiss affiliated hotels

Fig. 6.14
figure 14

(Source Authors’ computation)

Swiss hotels

Fig. 6.15
figure 15

(Source Authors’ computation)

Swiss gasthouses

Fig. 6.16
figure 16

(Source Authors’ computation)

Swiss travel agencies

Residual and forecasting errors statistics.

See Table 6.3.

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Scaglione, M., Murphy, J. (2020). Modelling Internet Diffusion Across Tourism Sectors. In: Alleman, J., Rappoport, P., Hamoudia, M. (eds) Applied Economics in the Digital Era. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40601-1_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40601-1_6

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