Valuing sports services in urban parks: A new model based on social network data

Access to sports and fitness activities is vital for individual well-being in crowded and stressful modern cities, but there has been little research exploring the valuation of sports services within cultural ecosystem services. The availability of social network data from mobile personal training applications opens the door to a new basis for research. For this paper, we used 934 data samples collected by the Codoon fitness application from October 2016 to September 2017 to develop a model for the valuation of sports services at Yunlong Lake-Yunlong Mountain Park. This model utilized data regarding the duration of exercise and the average hourly fee charged by a gym, along with the efficiency coefficient, the sports preference coefficient, and the income reduction method. The results of our proposed model showed that the value of sports services for the 934 sampled users was 47,624.92 CNY (7,286.61 USD; 1 CNY = 0.153 USD). The average values for the 839 running samples and 95 walking samples were 48.41 CNY (7.40 USD) and 73.81 CNY (11.29 USD), respectively. We estimated the annual benefits of the park's sports services as 108,504,761.6 CNY (16.6 million USD), indicating the value of the park's sports services to be about 7.23 billion CNY (1.1 billion USD). These results demonstrated that our proposed use of data from fitness-oriented mobile applications can provide a new approach to the appraisal of sports services within cultural ecosystem services.