Abstract

As the online secondary market for buying and selling sports tickets has grown more sophisticated over the last decade, the volume of academic research exploring how sports consumers behave within this marketplace has also grown, but is still underserved. Specifically, there have been no inquiries to date that look into whether secondary price markups differ across micro-events within a larger sporting event and no studies involving college sporting events, in particular the Division I Men’s Basketball Championships and its culminating weekend known as the Final Four. Using 285 online transactions accounting for 750 tickets purchased through online ticket vendor TicketCity.com for the 2013 Final Four at Atlanta’s Georgia Dome, the empirical results suggest that the underlying mechanism causing differential secondary markups differs across “session type.” These markup differentials are also influenced by the quantity of tickets purchased within a particular transaction as well as by seat quality. Though the results provide both the NCAA and TicketCity with strategic information to maximize future profits, an extension of this research would be to allow for comparisons across different parts of the entire tournament (thereby creating cross-venue and cross-city comparisons).