Session 11 - Seminar on research models and methods in economics
The aim of this disciplinary seminar is to present the most recent work by LARSH economists, but also to invite outside colleagues with recognized expertise in LARSH research areas.
Myriam Oumheta, LARSH-UPHF
"Do heritage labels influence tourism prices? A spatial hedonic analysis in a post-industrial context"
In post-industrial territories, heritage is an important lever for territorial requalification and a tool for tourism development. Yet, while the value of heritage occupies a growing place in academic literature, it remains little studied in the context of tourism markets and more rarely in the specific case of post-industrial destinations.
While the literature on tourism economics shows that the hedonic pricing method (Rosen, 1974) can be used to estimate tourists' propensity to pay for the attributes of an overnight stay, its various applications focus mainly on natural amenities, rather than heritage attributes. Furthermore, work in urban economics suggests that heritage can increase agents' willingness to pay and improve the perceived quality of the living environment. However, the transposition of these results to the post-industrial tourism context remains uncertain, and may even expose industrial heritage as a repellent factor ("bad public goods"), and lower the price of a night's stay in a hotel.
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Faced with these contrasting results, the paper presented here aims to explore the extent to which the proximity of different types of heritage, with varying levels of institutional recognition, influences the formation of tourist accommodation prices in the Bassin Minier. We formulate two propositions: (i) heritage is desirable and constitutes an amenity likely to increase visitors' willingness to pay; (ii) labeling acts as a signal differentiating the tourist value of sites.
