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Can We Find It at the Concessions? Understanding Price Elasticity in Professional SportsDePaul University
California State University, Bakersfield The sports economics literature regularly finds that sports teams price admissions in the inelastic range of demand. Given that marginal revenue is negative in this range, yet marginal cost is always nonnegative, this result suggests an inconsistency in the profit motive of owners. In this article, we attempt to explain inelastic ticket pricing by considering the complementarity between tickets sold and concessions. Depending on marginal revenue and cost parameters, we show that it is entirely possible to find profit-maximizing owners pricing tickets in the inelastic region of demand to sell more concessions.
Key Words: concession revenues inelastic pricing in MLB
Journal of Sports Economics, Vol. 8, No. 2,
183-191 (2007) | ||