FiT Publishing

The unwillingness of team owners to share their data prohibits a direct assessment of the value of professional team sports ownership. But insights into that value can be gleaned from actual team sale prices. First, throughout the entire modern history of Major League Baseball (MLB), the average real growth in team sale prices is twice the usual comparison value of 3% for the economy at large. Second, aggregated at the franchise level, the average rate of growth is about 1.6 times the 3% comparison. Third, the real growth rate an owner can expect from time of purchase to time of sale over...Read more

Dynamic pricing, well-known in the airline and hotel industries, has now been adopted by a handful of Major League Baseball teams in relation to pricing of tickets for their home games. Using data from four teams for the 2011 season, we examine the role that a variety of factors play in explaining differences in ticket prices across games throughout the season for these teams. Key factors such as the day of the week, opponent promotions, starting pitcher, and weather are investigated to shed light on the determinants of the willingness to pay of baseball fans for these teams under a...Read more

The growth of the second-hand ticket market has increased the complexity of ticket pricing for sport franchises. In 2007, Major League Baseball (MLB) signed an agreement with StubHub, an online seller of secondhand tickets. Although pricing in MLB has been investigated previously in the literature, price dispersion (i.e., multiple prices for a similar product) and the effects of the second-hand ticket market have been largely neglected. The purpose of this research is to examine the impact of the StubHub agreement on pricing behavior of MLB teams using data from the seasons 1975 to 2010 (...Read more

More than 100 new minor league baseball stadiums were built in the 1990s and early 2000s following the opening of several successful new venues in Major League Baseball. Sports economics literature suggests that the economic impact potential of new stadiums is overstated because attendance gains from new stadiums are short lived (i.e., a novelty effect). This study examined the impact of new minor league baseball stadiums on annual attendance using attendance data from 101 stadiums opened between 1993 and 2004. Results indicated that attendance levels attained the first year a stadium...Read more

 The purpose of this paper was to develop a demand model that determined if a relationship existed between the variation in team payroll and spectator attendance at Major League Baseball (MLB) games. A secondary purpose was to determine if the presence of star players was related to MLB attendance. Our findings suggest that if a star player does not contribute to an increase in the team’s on-field performance, the player has little influence on attendance. Additionally, the assumption that an increased team payroll will result in additional attendance is usually correct, yet incomplete....Read more