FiT Publishing

While assessment of team-level marketing performance for a professional sport franchise is important for both the team marketer and the researcher to develop a marketing strategy and understand marketing performance, no evidence using a full set of teams for a long period of time currently exists. We propose that marketing performance can be estimated with a stochastic frontier model. Using twenty seasons of Major League Baseball (MLB) attendance data, we estimate the frontier attendance (i.e., the maximal Which Professional Sport Team Has the Best Marketing Performance in Driving...Read more

This paper investigates the effects of the recent economic crisis on Major League Baseball (MLB) attendance during the 2008 and 2009 seasons, adopting the composite index of coincident indicators released by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia to capture the impact of economic circumstances. Major advantages of the coincident indexes are the ability to specify monthly changes in state economic conditions, as well as combining the information from several economic indicators. The estimates for the coincident indicators suggest the economic downturn drove a fall in attendance of about 6...Read more

Many previous attempts to estimate attendance demand for sporting events have concluded that teams with market power are nonetheless pricing tickets in the inelastic portion of the demand curve. These studies, however, have suffered from problems with price and seat quality measurement, multiproduct pricing strategies, and simultaneity in prices and quantities. Using geographically-specific sales data for Atlanta Braves season tickets and multigame ticket packages, we estimate demand for attendance by adopting the travel-cost methodology used in the non-market valuation literature. Using...Read more