Helping to sustain a viable rural sector, rural tourism enjoys public support in many countries. We claim that due to club-good and agglomeration externalities in the rural accommodation market, public support should be integrated in a broader local development policy that regulates the number...

This paper applies a discrete-choice framework with product differentiation to model the rural tourism industry in Israel and to jointly estimate the effect of lodging and farm characteristics on consumer preferences and firms' costs. The model accounts for heterogeneity in tastes and...