An optimal size for rural tourism villages with agglomeration and congestion effects
研究了乡村旅游住宿市场中集聚与拥挤外部性如何影响最优住宿单元数量，发现现行政策下数量可能过多导致福利损失，对制定地方发展政策有参考价值。
Helping to sustain a viable rural sector, rural tourism enjoys public support in many countries. We claim that due to congestion and agglomeration externalities in the rural accommodation market, public support should be integrated into a broader local development policy that regulates the number of accommodation units in one locality. To demonstrate this, we extended an equilibrium model that accounts for product differentiation and oligopolistic competition to address congestion and agglomeration effects, and applied it to data collected in northern Israel. We show that, under the prevailing policy measures, the number of accommodation units can exceed the optimal one, leading to loss of welfare.