Secondary Market Behavior During College Football’s Postseason: Evidence from the 2014 Rose Bowl and BCS Championship Game

Patrick Rishe
Jason Reese
and Brett Boyle

There is considerable literature regarding the primary sports pricing market (Fort, 2004; Coates & Humphreys, 2007; Krautmann & Berri, 2007) that argues that ticketing professionals engage in inelastic ticket pricing, and that such behavior is not counter to a profit-maximizing objective because it enables organizations to optimize other non-ticket sources of revenue. Additionally, there is long-standing evidence from the marketing literature (Scitovsky, 1945; Monroe & Krishnan, 1985; Tsao, Pitt, & Caruana, 2005) of a strong correlation between the price of a product and perceptions of product quality. Therefore, investigating secondary price trends in unexamined sports industry niches affords an opportunity to (1) confirm whether these niches also engage in inelastic ticket pricing, and (2) explore how perceptions of quality (among other factors) contribute to secondary markup differentials across tickets sold.