Primary Market Dynamic Pricing for Sports Tickets: Theory and Application

In professional sports, fan attendance at games is one of the largest drivers of revenue and a significant focus for all sports teams. While sports tickets can benefit from dynamic pricing techniques developed for airlines or hotels, they have constraints related to limited inventory, season tickets, and the attendance-revenue trade-off that make them unique and difficult to price with existing dynamic pricing systems. In this work, we present a novel dynamic pricing strategy for sports tickets, developed with an engineering approach alongside primary market ticket data provided by the San Antonio Spurs. Using dynamic programming and matrix completion for modeling customer demand, we provide optimal price recommendations for all time periods before a game. We use these recommendations, along with information on current prices, to provide a suite of ticket price optimization and analysis tools. These tools are led by our Manual Price Adjustment Guide, which combines our optimal price recommendations with ticketing analyst expertise for a hybrid solution designed to improve ticket pricing and increase team revenue.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Hylen, Spencer David

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Hosoi, Anette

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright MIT

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/144487

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/144487