From the inbox:
Dear Prof John Whitehead,
Journal: Economic Inquiry
Article title: "Consumption Benefits of NHL Game Trips Estimated from Revealed and Stated Preference Demand Data"
Your article is currently at the following stage of production:
Early View: Your corrected article is published online ahead of the online publication of the journal issue. Please note that this is the final, published version of your article; no further changes can be made to it.
You may use the article DOI citation reference at this point.
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Here is the link and the abstract:
This paper examines the demand for hockey game trips among metropolitan and nonmetropolitan residents of Alberta, Canada. Using data on both revealed and stated preference game-trip behavior from a telephone survey conducted throughout Alberta, we estimate the effect of ticket prices, team quality, arena amenities, and capacity on the latent demand for National Hockey League hockey games. We find that lower ticket prices, higher team quality, and additional capacity encourage attendance. In the status quo scenario, consumer surplus per game is $50 for those who had attended hockey games and about 50% less for those who had not attended games. Exploiting the stated preference data, we develop a number of other consumer surplus estimates. We also include travel costs in the estimation of the demand function and estimate the full value of the game trip considering both ticket prices and travel costs. Sold-out arenas in Calgary and Edmonton generate annual consumption benefits of $40 and $35 million when only ticket prices are used to calculate consumer surplus (i.e., excluding travel costs). Considering the full-price consumer surplus for the Calgary Flames of $103 per game trip, the annual consumption benefits may be as high as $82 million.
When users and non-users are split travel costs influence game trip decisions in only one out of four cases (Flames attendees [i.e., users]). But, my favorite result didn't make it into the paper as it created some other messiness (and this is a sports economics paper). When users and nonusers are combined, travel costs have a negative effect on the number of trips taken in both markets with the effect being driven, obviously, at the participation stage (i.e., the extensive margin).
