What residents of potential Olympic cities want: using conjoint analysis to deal with dominant and heterogeneous preferences

ABSTRACT

Understanding residents’ preferences for mega-sports events is a hot topic in tourism and event research. Thus far, most studies have assumed homogeneous preferences, and linear utility additivity of all event attributes when measuring residents’ support. This study uses an adaptive choice-based conjoint analysis combined with hierarchical Bayesian estimation. In contrast to previous research, the method considers the entire spectrum of residents’ preferences at the individual level and identifies non-substitutable dominant preferences (must-haves and unacceptables). A survey with 687 residents was conducted in Tyrol, an Austrian state with a remarkable Olympic tradition. The findings of this study extend the current literature by showing that the usually applied assumptions (homogeneous and linear additive substitutable preferences) are violated with substantial consequences. A simulation allows transforming the survey results into hypothetical referendum support rates for different feasible concepts of the Olympic Games.

KEYWORDS:

• Heterogeneous preferences
• dominant preferences
• discrete choice experiment
• event organisation
• residents’ support

Acknowledgement

The authors are grateful to the students who assisted with the data collection. The authors would like to thank the Taylor& Francis Editing Service for editing and proofreading this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical approval

This survey was conducted according to the ‘ethical guidelines for surveys’ approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the Department of Sports Science as well as the Board for Ethical Issues (BfEI) of the University of Innsbruck.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the publishing fund of the University of Innsbruck.