One of the things that really bug me is when owners of professional sporting team complain about half empty arenas.  It doesn’t take an MBA degree to understand the simple laws of economics.  In order to sell all of your inventory (aka the tickets) you will have to set the price at a level your customers are willing to pay.  Set the price to high, and you have inventory left over.  Set the prices too low, and a secondary market will develop reselling your inventory at a higher price (in this case ticket scalping).  It seems to me that the owners of teams are stuck in the past and haven’t figured out that with the mass adoption of the internet, you no longer have to go with fixed prices for all your tickets.  In the old world, the owners and managers needed to set the prices before the beginning of a season, and then hope for the best.  With the internet and all the online services it offers, you no longer have to fix the prices for the whole season.  I’m not saying to get rid of season tickets, just that there really isn’t much of a reason to stick with a constant price for tickets that are not part of some sort of package.  Why not sell all the tickets that are not part of a package via StubHub like auctions?  It would insure that every single ticket could actually be sold, at the current market value. 

 

The reason why tickets are left unsold is the fact that the people have determined that the value of going to that particular event is less then the price of the ticket.  If the owners of the teams think that a full house is that important, why not auction them off?  This way every single ticket would be sold at a price equal to the perceived value.  The software for auctions is out there and is proven, so the technical details are not the problem.

 

Part of the problem is that the owners do not want to raise the ire of the season ticket holders (which are most large corporations).  If the owners charge $70 a ticket for a seat in a season ticket plan, but the average auction price is only $35, the season ticket holder will wonder why they are paying $70 a ticket.  The extra money charged is really the extra value of knowing that you have the same seats to every game in that package.  I really don’t think this will be an issue, but I’m sure some will disagree.  One of the to temper an potential issue would be to let the season ticket holder resell the tickets they do not want thru the same auction system the owner is using (for a small fee).  This way the owner get the guaranteed revenue via the season ticket holder, but for that risk, the ticket holder could recoup some of their costs by selling tickets for events they don’t wish to attend.  There is no guarantee that the ticket will, sell, but that is part of the risk the season ticket holder assumed from the beginning.

 

A major side benefit of something like this would be all the data collected by this process.  With it an owner could use it to better determine the prices for the season ticket packages for the next season, which visiting teams have the best (or worst) value, and what exactly the true value actually is.  For the single ticket buyers the benefits would be just as great.  You would be able to purchase tickets at true market value.  But the most important benefit (in my eyes) would be if the owners sold their tickets directly, instead of thru Ticketmaster.  Ticketmaster is a monopoly that needs to be taken out.  All their extra fees are driving up the total cost of going to an event, and that is money out of the pockets of the owners.  It is in the owners best interests to bypass Ticketmaster, and eliminate their stranglehold on the ticket selling business.