Valuing Recreational Sports Participation: Estimating Willingness to Pay for Community-Based Physical Activity

Community-based physical activity generates private and social returns that are rarely priced, leaving local governments with little evidence on how much residents value organized recreational sport. Drawing on welfare economic theory of value, the health capital model, the benefits-based approach to leisure, consumer perceived value theory and consumption capital theory, this study examines how three dimensions of perceived benefits (perceived health benefits, perceived social benefits and perceived well-being benefits) shape willingness to pay (WTP) for community-based physical activity, and whether participation intensity moderates these relationships. Data were collected through face-to-face interviews with 312 adult recreational sport participants in wards and communes of Hanoi, Vietnam, and analyzed with Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) using a two-stage approach for interaction terms, complemented by t-tests and one-way ANOVA. The model explains 88.6% of the variance in WTP. Perceived well-being benefits are the dominant driver of WTP (β = 0.622), whereas perceived health (β = 0.058) and social benefits (β = 0.061) exert small but significant effects, and participation intensity has a strong direct effect (β = 0.402). Participation intensity strengthens the well-being-WTP relationship (β = 0.081) but weakens the health-WTP (β = -0.122) and social-WTP (β = -0.140) relationships, indicating that health and social benefits drive valuation mainly among less active participants. WTP also differs significantly across gender, age, education and income groups. The study decomposes the value of recreational sport into distinct benefit channels, identifies participation intensity as a boundary condition of benefit valuation, and provides evidence for fee design and investment priorities under Vietnam’s sports development strategy to 2030.