Paying to Play: How Seasonal Fees Affect Disc Golf Course Choice

Kenneth A. Liao, Jimena González-Ramírez, Kevin Meyer and Victoria Adams

Journal of Sports Economics, 2026, vol. 27, issue 6, 655-681

Abstract: This paper measures how a seasonal vehicle entry fee affects disc golf course choice in Westchester County, New York. We use ten years of user-level data from the UDisc app, covering 30,531 visits by 758 players from 2015 to 2024, in a setting with two nearby and broadly comparable courses. One course is located within a state park that charges a predictable $10 per-vehicle fee on a seasonal calendar, while the other course is free year-round. We estimate a within-user probit model of course choice, controlling for weather differences and a linear time index, with fixed effects for user, day of week, holiday, and year. When the fee is in effect, the probability of choosing the fee course falls by about 1.5 percentage points, a result that is robust to logit and linear probability models.

Keywords: disc golf; frisbee golf; recreation demand; site choice; congestion pricing; peak-load pricing; public parks; user fees; demand estimation; substitutability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C25 D12 H41 L83 Q58 Z20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/15270025261450148 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jospec:v:27:y:2026:i:6:p:655-681

DOI: 10.1177/15270025261450148

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Sports Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().