Introducing Cultural Entropy as a Framework for Understanding Cultural Tourism

Abstract

This paper explores cultural entropy as a novel framework for understanding cultural tourism. It examines how increasing cultural complexity impacts authenticity, sustainability, and accessibility, highlighting strategies to manage uncertainty in cultural interactions. Using a simple model that relates a tourist's utility to their capacity for cultural entropy and the carry cost in entropy of multiple cultural competencies, an optimal number of cultural alternatives is deduced based on their relative preference between the number of alternatives and cognitive space to savor them. Future research into managing entropy as it relates to tourist impact on cultural homogenization, heritage conservation and visitor engagement are suggested.