The Economics of Sport Event Attendees

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the idea of promoting local development through the hosting of events, which are very often perceived as a catalyst for legacy building and as a strong accelerator of economic and image changes. Thus, staging events has become a permanent and inevitable part of many development strategies at all governmental levels (cities, regions, countries) across the world. Although attendees are a constitutive part of events, there has been a scarcity of empirical analyses of their behavior from an economic standpoint. This is particularly apparent for smaller-scale (non-mega) sport events, even though they lately experience a tremendous interest in being hosted by many destinations worldwide. This limited empirical evidence on the behavior of event attendees at non-mega events constitutes a clear research gap.
As a contribution to this area of research, this PhD thesis attempts to investigate the behavior of event attendees at non-mega events from an economic perspective. Particularly, drawing on empirical data from four non-mega sport events, it tries to provide further evidence on (a) the composition of event attendees, (b) factors influencing non-mega event attendees’ spending and length of stay in the host region and (c) the sensitivity of the output of economic impact assessments with respect to changes in basic exogenous assumptions. The outcome of this project is expected to (a) increase academic knowledge regarding non-mega events and (b) offer better, that is more reliable and context-specific, proxy variables as inputs for any form of ex-ante economic impact assessment. Based on such more reliable ex-ante estimates of the economic impact, decisions whether a city/region wants to subsidize the hosting of a specific event will be more thorough, careful, and balanced.