Micro-modelling of individual tourist’s information-seeking behaviour: a heterogeneityspecific study

Abstract

Previous research done on tourists’ information-seeking behaviour has focused on aggregate-level information seeking. The aggregate-level study has significant disadvantage in decision-making since actual behaviour of tourists gets averaged out due to aggregation. Understanding the responses of individual tourist’s information seekers in different contexts can be better performed by individual-level study. This study emphasizes the importance of information-seeking behaviour in the context of personal differences between the tourists. Heterogeneity suggests that different tourists behave differently when seeking information. With data of 307 tourists, we first find tourists’ information-seeking behavioural dimensions. We then group the tourists into segments according to these behavioural dimensions, and then investigate the impacts of these behavioural dimensions considering individual-level heterogeneity through hierarchical Bayes estimation. We then compare these estimates with aggregate-level estimates to find