The aim of this course is to enable students to critically analyze consumer, business, and public decisions in the tourism sector within the framework of both mainstream (rational/classical) economic theories and behavioral economics, considering bounded rationality, cognitive biases, and intuitions. The course aims to equip students with the skills to reinterpret tourism decision-making processes—where neoclassical models often fail—using behavioral finance and empirical economics methods, and to design original academic research that will contribute to the international literature in this field.

This course examines decision-making mechanisms in the tourism industry through two main poles: Classical/Neoclassical Economics, based on rational choice theory, and Behavioral Economics, which incorporates psychological realities into the model. Throughout the course, traditional tourism demand models (utility maximization, price elasticity) are compared with alternative behavioral models (framing effect, loss aversion, social norms). Destination choice, the luxury consumption paradox in tourism, asymmetric information, strategic pricing strategies of tourism businesses, and the cognitive processes underlying tourists' environmentally conscious behavior are discussed through current top-tier academic papers and empirical studies.