Demand, supply, and the market

The phenomenon of tourism has long been discussed in a multidisciplinary framework in which almost all social sciences, primarily economics, sociology, and geography, have attempted to explain tourism from their own disciplinary angles. In the history of economic thought, the notion of market equilibrium resolved the dispute on what determines the value of a good. What determines price, and how, had been a persistent dispute between classical and the neoclassical economists until the late nineteenth century when the idea of marginal utility was propounded. A consumer whose willingness to pay is higher than the market price obtains consumer surplus, which is the consumer’s willingness to pay less the market price. Thus, the higher the consumer’s willingness to pay, the more the consumer surplus; and the lower the market price, the more the consumer surplus as well, other things being equal.