Abstract
Elite sports investment is usually justified on the basis that elite sports success has a wide range of social-psychological benefits among the general population. However, insufficient evidence about these positive effects has made it difficult to show the validity to ‘alternative voices’ opposed to the elite sports funding. The purpose of the present study was to estimate the monetary value of elite sports success in Japan by using the contingent valuation method (CVM) addressing the problems in sports management literatures. Data was collected from n=850 stratified randomly selected Japanese by means of an Internet survey. Respondents were asked to state their willingness-to-pay for elite sports policy, which aims Japan being ranked in the top-five in total number of gold medals in the summer Olympics and the top-ten in winter, which is the official target of ‘The Sports Basic Plan’ , using a double-bounded dichotomous choice. The results revealed that median WTP was 405 JPY with a certain amount of validity, which was calculated from the whole population as 42.2 billion JPY. Our results suggest that Japanese believed that social-psychological benefits generated by the elite sports policy exceeded the government elite sports budget (about 16 billion) .
