The home field advantage: Implications for the pricing of tickets to professional team sporting events

Existing empirical estimates of the elasticity of demand for tickets to professional team sporting events are consistently inelastic, throwing into question the assumption of profit-maximizing behavior on the part of team management. We provide a new theory of team sport ticket pricing, based on the home field advantage, which implies that the elasticity of demand relevant for profit maximization is more elastic than the traditional ceteris paribus elasticity measure. Thus, the inelastic traditional point estimates are not necessarily inconsistent with team profit maximization. Copyright Springer 1998