In the past, a ticket merely certified that a transaction had concluded; today, it serves as a starting point and connector for cross-scenario consumption. Photo: TUCHONG

What if a movie ticket stub could activate benefits across more than 30 business districts? What if one exhibition ticket could multiply into surrounding consumption at a ratio of 1:30? What was once little more than proof that a transaction had ended is now being reconfigured as a trigger for further spending. Train tickets, concert passes, and scenic-spot admissions are increasingly becoming “keys”—leveraged through digital platforms and coordinated merchant programs—to unlock wider chains of consumption.

With the “terminal” nature of a ticket evolving into the starting point of broader consumption chains amid the digital wave, giving rise to what economists call the “ticket-stub economy,” several questions arise: What economic logic sustains this model, and can it develop beyond short-term promotional tactics into a stable, self-reinforcing ecosystem?

Starting point of cross-scenario consumption

During the 15th Beijing International Film Festival, holders of festival tickets enjoyed various benefits including free or discounted entry to selected scenic spots and dining discounts. Similar initiatives have emerged across China.

The city of Luoyang, in Henan Province, introduced its “Train Ticket Half-Price Tour” campaign, allowing arriving travelers to use their train tickets for half-price entry to local attractions, effectively transforming them into catalysts for tourism spending. During the Shanghai F1 Grand Prix, race tickets were linked with hotel packages, specialty dining, cultural and creative retail, and other offers, forming an “event+” consumption chain. The Chengdu Universiade launched a citywide ticket-benefit program covering catering, retail, culture, tourism, and related sectors.

“The role of ticket stubs is undergoing a fundamental shift,” observed Wen Yuyuan, a professor from the School of Applied Economics at Renmin University of China. In the past, a ticket merely certified that a transaction had concluded; today, it serves as a starting point and connector for cross-scenario consumption.

As a nascent economic model, the ticket-stub economy is expanding rapidly worldwide by integrating receipts from diverse consumption activities and partnering with merchants, food and beverage operators, and hotels to offer cross-scenario discounts. Data indicates that the global ticket-stub economy reached a market size of roughly 250 billion yuan in 2024 and is projected to approach 400 billion yuan in 2025, representing a year-on-year increase of about 60%.

Dong Ximiao, deputy director of the Shanghai Finance and Development Laboratory, noted that the rise of the ticket-stub economy reflects the combined influence of consumer demand, business strategy, urban governance, and policy guidance. Consumers increasingly seek not just value in a single purchase, but maximized value across an entire consumption journey. Businesses aim to convert foot traffic into repeat spending, while urban administrators view ticket-linked programs as tools to enhance public service experiences.

Unlike traditional promotional campaigns, the ticket-stub economy aggregates and analyzes multi-stage consumption data associated with tickets, constructing a consumer-centered closed-loop service system that enables deeper resource integration and value sharing across industries and brands.

“This is not a simple case of bundled sales,” Wen emphasized, “but the creation of a micro-circulation ecosystem centered on the user’s full experience and linked by data and benefit circulation.”

Reflecting multiple economic laws

In practice, the operational mechanism of the ticket-stub economy has generated notable aggregation and ecosystem effects. Using the Shanghai F1 Grand Prix’s citywide consumption linkage as an example, Wen explained that integrating tickets with transportation, catering, accommodation, and retail stimulates repeat and composite consumption, while activating related industrial chains.

From an economic perspective, the ticket-stub economy embodies several established principles. Dong argued that it aligns with behavioral economics: Ticket stubs arouse emotional resonance through symbolic value, activating mechanisms such as loss aversion and instant feedback, thereby encouraging consumers to make additional cross-scenario purchases.

At the same time, the model exhibits the network effects described by Metcalfe’s Law. “Ticket stubs connect multiple scenarios and link isolated consumers into a collaborative consumption network. Each additional participating industry or user increases the overall value of the network exponentially,” Dong said.

The ticket-stub economy also embodies economies of scope and aspects of long-tail theory. By sharing infrastructure such as data platforms, enterprises expand business scope at relatively low cost, while activating fragmented and personalized long-tail demand that might otherwise remain untapped.

Qi Ji, a professor from the School of Cultural Industries Management at Communication University of China (CUC), observed that the ticket-stub economy extends one-off transactions into cross-scenario, cross-format experiences, shifting the consumption model from single-point to chain consumption. This makes it an important tool for boosting domestic demand and promoting resource coordination.

How can the ticket-stub economy move beyond isolated successes or short-term marketing campaigns and evolve into a sustainable, self-reinforcing, and replicable industrial ecosystem? Yang Hong, a professor from the School of Cultural Industries Management at CUC, believes that such a transition depends on a series of institutional designs and regulatory safeguards.

Foremost is the establishment of a win-win benefit distribution and incentive mechanism for all parties. Because the ticket-stub economy involves organizers, sponsors, local merchants, consumers, and other stakeholders, it requires a reasonable and stable revenue-sharing system as well as incentives that encourage innovation. Equally critical is a robust framework for data sharing and governance. Behind ticket-linked benefits lie cross-platform ticketing, transaction, and social data; the efficiency of data integration and utilization largely determines the scope of potential gains, while monopolistic control or misuse must be prevented.

Dong further identified three roles ticket stubs play in industrial collaboration. First, especially in electronic form, they function as natural “traffic converters,” breaking the traditional model of “settlement per event, per venue.” Second, they operate as cross-industry “hard currency,” bundling rights and privileges into transferable packages within a collaborative ecosystem. Third, subject to legal and regulatory compliance, they act as user data identifiers, connecting users’ consumption behaviors across scenarios.

Qi added that by treating performances, sports events, and similar activities as nodes, ticket stubs connect previously scattered consumption spaces, strengthening urban spatial connectivity and enhancing the competitiveness of the overall service ecosystem. This represents not only business-model innovation, but also exemplifies modernized urban governance.

Theoretical research to boost in-depth development

Yet for all its rapid growth, the ticket-stub economy also faces mounting challenges, including data security and privacy risks, coordination costs and disputes over benefit distribution, and gaps in the protection of consumer rights.

Wen argued that the healthy development of the ticket-stub economy requires multidisciplinary collaboration, encompassing consumer behavior research, data technology, social networks, and policies and regulations. In his view, consumer psychology and behavioral science can help optimize incentive design for consumers; information technology and data sciences determine operational efficiency and innovation potential; and law and public administration are crucial for data privacy protection and market regulation.

Regarding data governance, Yang suggested clarifying usage boundaries among organizers, partner merchants, and consumers. Measures such as anonymization and standardized authorization procedures should be adopted to maximize data value while protecting user privacy.

The protection of consumer rights and interests is equally indispensable to the long-term development of the ticket-stub economy. Some ticket-stub discount programs suffer from opaque conditions and cumbersome redemption procedures, undermining user experience. To address this, scholars have called for unified standards and service norms to safeguard consumers’ rights to information and choice.

The ticket-stub economy remains in an early stage of theoretical construction and empirical synthesis, leaving ample room for further exploration. Qi proposed that academic inquiry should highlight its distinctiveness as a cross-scenario consumption mechanism—specifically, its capacity to reorganize the connection logic of “event–scene–behavior” and transform one-off consumption into sustained engagement.

At the structural level, deeper analysis is needed of the operational logic and coordination framework of the ticket-stub economy, with a particular focus on its role in extending consumption chains, restructuring spatial flows, and cultivating behavioral stickiness, as well as the coordination mechanisms and institutional design frameworks among government authorities, platforms, and market actors.

Methodologically, more data- and case-based studies should be conducted to assess its actual impact on business structure, spatial configuration, and consumption patterns, while addressing practical constraints such as subsidy dependence, high coordination costs, and inconsistent standards.

From the perspective of cultural development, Yang advised moving beyond short-term promotional thinking and more deeply integrating ticket stubs with IP related to sporting events, urban culture, and other regionally distinctive cultural brands. By building sustainable content chains—including cultural and creative products and study-tour offerings—the model can strengthen industrial embeddedness and local relevance.

Across China—from the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region to the Yangtze River Delta, from the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area to the southwest—the innovative “ticket-stub+” consumption model is steadily taking root and beginning to thrive. Its rise signals a broader transformation of China’s consumer market: from expansion in scale to enhancement in quality, and from single-point to ecosystem-based consumption. As digital technologies mature and the consumption environment improves, the modest ticket stub is emerging—through new technologies and business models—as a bridge linking hundreds of millions of consumers with a vast market, poised to unlock still greater potential in the years ahead.