Modelling expenditure in tourism using the log-skew normal distribution

ABSTRACT

Many factors are involved in tourist decision expenses. Such circumstances may give rise to some asymmetry in the distribution of tourism expenditure. We propose in this paper a reparameterization of the three-parameter log-skew normal distribution for modelling the expenditure at the country of origin, at destination, and total expenditure in a tourism setting. This distribution seems to fit the expenditure data satisfactorily in all the parts of the empirical distribution. In particular, the proposed model is well suited to capture the skewness and kurtosis that may be present and the long tail to the right that the three variables mentioned above tend to present in practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Expenditure
• log-skew normal distribution
• tourism

MATHEMATICS SUBJECT CLASSIFICATION (2020):

• 62J02
• 62P25
• 62P20

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Recall that $-1<b_3<1,$ with 1 representing extreme right skewness and $-1$, extreme left skewness.

Additional information

Funding

EGD thanks to the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (project ECO2017-85577-P) for partial support of this work. (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Spain).