Resumen

The successful development of sustainable rural tourism requires the creation and consolidation of memorable experiences in rural communities. We note that the community's attitudes toward tourism development highly influence the success and failure of these experiences (Chin, Lo, Songan and Nair, 2014). For example, “The Historic Villages”, in Portugal, is a rural tourist destination that offers an experience based on military, religious and folk architecture (Silva, 2012). Since these activities are the result of the collaboration between government and residents, we study the creation and strengthening of them from a game theoretic approach. We analyze the emergence, or dissipation, of cooperation from the perspective of an infinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma. Also, we provide a close form to the minimum incentive to induce cooperation among residents of rural areas, and we show how large must be this incentive in developed and developing economies through their social discount rate.