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

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

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