Uncertainty and Tourism Consumption Preferences: Evidence from the Representative Chinese City of Shenzhen

As the fastest growing city in China, Shenzhen, a pioneer of reform and opening up, seems to have exhausted its advantages of geographical convenience, cheap land, and cheap labor; thus, the tourism industry has been adopted as a new economic strategy. However, the Shenzhen tourism market has received little attention from scholars and few studies have been done to investigate the relationships between uncertainty and tourism consumption preferences in different cultures. Therefore, this paper attempts to study Shenzhen as a travel destination to explore the consumption preferences of domestic and international tourists, specify uncertainties in tourism consumption activities, and examine their impacts on preferences. The above aims are achieved using a survey method and a new theoretically proposed preference uncertainty model inspired by combining the modified virtual expert preference approach and the ordered probit model (MVEP-OPM), in which three major components of tourism consumption (food, accommodation, and shopping) are estimated. (1) The results show that there are significant differences in tourism consumption preferences between domestic tourists and international visitors. (2) Inexperience, unfamiliarity, imperfect knowledge, and policy uncertainty are major uncertainties in tourism consumption activities, which affect tourist preferences toward consumption behavior. (3) Uncertainty plays a different moderating role in product-related influential factors, such as sanitation, safety, and decoration.