Scoring a Touchdown with Variable Pricing : Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment in the NFL Ticket Markets

Although it is theoretically established that variable pricing benefits event organizers by enabling them to respond to changing demand, reports point to somewhat limited implementation. In this paper, we study the implications of a switch to variable pricing on the primary and resale ticket markets using quasi-experimental data from the National Football League in the U.S. Applying a difference-in-differences technique with propensity score weighting, we find that the adoption of variable pricing increased ticket sales in the primary market by 1.86% per game. Through several mechanism checks, we show that variable pricing had greater success in team hometowns with lower income levels and higher income diversity. We also show that creating more game tiers in variable pricing led to higher sales. We next explore the impact of variable pricing on consumers' activities in the resale market. We find that the number of ticket listings increased and the minimum ticket prices decreased in the resale market for less attractive games. Neither of these effects are observed for more attractive games prior to the beginning of the season. However, in the 21-day period before each game, minimum ticket prices for more attractive games increased in the resale market