Ticket price vs attendance article

[WV Brew]

Just saw an article by Phil Miller, et. al. at Minnesota State on price elasticies of baseball attendance. www.marketpower.typepad.com/market_power/

If you are interested in economics you might be interested in this. If not, ignore me. It studied how baseball attendance varied based on several factors. Namely, ticket price, income in the local area, winning percentage in the current and previous years, age of stadium and strike years were included. Data run from 1970 through 2003. For the Brewers, the one interesting thing was that the authors estimated that the Brewers were operating on the elastic portion of their demand curve, which implies they could increase revenues by lowering ticket prices. This was also true for KC, Oakland and San Diego. Also, the Brewers and Yankees were the only two teams whose current winning percentage did not have any effect on attendance, although previous year's winning percentage was significant for the Brewers. People make their plans early in Wisconsin?

 

Price effects were positive for the Yankees, Red Sox and Orioles (raising ticket prices actually raised attendance). Prices had no effect for the Indians, Reds, Dodgers and Mets. The rest of the teams studied acted normally (increasing prices decreases attendance). Baseball is an inferior good in Oakland (rising incomes lead to lower attendance). For what it's worth.

[dadofandrew]

One reason for the current winning percentage vs. last year's is that both the Yankees and Brewers have plenty of good seats available, or another way of looking at it, after season tickets are sold, there are still plenty of tiks available for every game. In the case of Fenway, for example, many buy packages just to get tiks for certain games.

 

That might be different this year for NY, as they are likely to sell out nearly every game, due to the "last season of the old stadium" mystique.