I Don’t Care If I Never Get Back? Time, Travel Costs, and the Estimation of Baseball Season-Ticket Demand

Many previous attempts to estimate attendance demand for sporting events have concluded that teams with market power are nonetheless pricing tickets in the inelastic portion of the demand curve. These studies, however, have suffered from problems with price and seat quality measurement, multiproduct pricing strategies, and simultaneity in prices and quantities. Using geographically-specific sales data for Atlanta Braves season tickets and multigame ticket packages, we estimate demand for attendance by adopting the travel-cost methodology used in the non-market valuation literature. Using conservative assumptions, our Tobit specification produces point estimates of the price elasticity of demand for full-season ticket packages that are larger in magnitude than those in the early literature and do not reject the null hypothesis of pricing at unit elasticity. We also estimate the income elasticity for ticket packages as being well over 1.0 for full-season ticket packages.