Patrick J. Rishe
David Sanders
Jason Reese
and Michael Mondello

In a seminal investigation of secondary pricing for college football bowl games, Rishe, Reese, and Boyle (2015) found Rose Bowl administrators price their face values in the inelastic range of consumer demand, and factors such as pent-up demand, distance traveled, and perceived seat quality impacted the size of secondary markups. Their study, however, lacked a breadth of application because it only focused on two bowl games occurring at the same venue and city. Conversely, this paper uses 9,413 transactions through TicketCity reflecting secondary ticket sales across 55 different bowl games...Read more

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...Read more

Stacey L. Brook

 Economists have been perplexed by the overwhelming evidence that sports teams set ticket prices in the inelastic range of spectator demand. In response, a number of profit-maximizing explanations have been proposed in the literature explaining why sports teams set ticket prices in the inelastic range of spectator demand, yet an evaluation of the proposed theories is missing. Therefore, using National Football League team data covering the 1995 through the 1999 seasons is employed to: a) determine if NFL teams do set ticket prices in the inelastic range of spectator demand...Read more