Contract-Aware Virtual Experimentation for Tourism: A Calibrated Econometric Framework for Pre-Testing Sustainability Nudges

Field experiments remain the gold standard for evaluating behavioral nudges in tourism and hospitality, yet they are costly and operationally disruptive. We introduce a contract-aware virtual experimentation framework that combines large-scale simulated responses with small human validation samples to enable rigorous, low-cost pre-testing of sustainability interventions. The approach treats synthetic labels as noisy measurements and applies link-space calibration to restore nominal coverage and reduce mean squared error under explicit external-validity assumptions. Using two canonical hospitality interventions—normative appeals for towel reuse and gamified strategies for buffet waste reduction—we show that episodic conditioning improves predictive fidelity, yielding calibrated estimates that closely approximate field benchmarks (reuse ≈ +6.5 percentage points; waste ≈ −32%). Monte Carlo diagnostics confirm that coverage approaches 95% and precision improves as validation size grows. This study contributes a reproducible econometric workflow for virtual experimentation in tourism, offering a scalable, ethically responsible complement to field trials.