THE POTENTIAL OF 'INFORMATION ACCELERATION' FOR FORECASTING CRITICAL PARAMETERS IN THE SPACE TOURISM MARKET

摘要

The paper investigates the potential of the market forecasting technique 'information acceleration (IA)' for the space tourism market forecast. Developed by MIT researchers, this method 'accelerates' respondents into future states of the space tourism market and provides them with enough information to make realistic purchase choices in a future decision environment (Urban et al., 1997). The paper reviews both traditional research on space tourism as well as a first successful use of information acceleration by Crouch, Devinney and Louviere (Crouch et al, 2006). The authors identify significant room for improvement in the use of IA for space-tourism, e.g. by measuring 'incentive aligned' willingness-to-pay (WTP). All methods used in space tourism so far can be expected to have suffered from hypothetical bias which might have led to overstatements of WTP by 300%. Also, the authors emphasize the role of network externalities for understanding market development and developing the right market strategies. The paper concludes with an outline of an advanced IA study that is better suited to reveal the true WTP of participants and to gauge the effects of network externalities.