Rethinking baseball ticket prices
The other day, teaching assistant Matthew Sweeney, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management, was talking about price discrimination in a section for the course Intermediate Microeconomics.
“Matt led a discussion of a story by the AP on how the San Francisco Giants baseball team is experimenting with ‘dynamic pricing’ – changing ticket prices based on factors such as day of the week, opposing team, even starting pitchers and weather,” wrote the professor for the course, John Cawley, in an e-mail. “To foster discussion, Matt asked the students to envision themselves in the Giants’ front office, and think about whether fans might be angry about this policy.”
The discussion got one of the students, Daniel Novick ’12, thinking about the issues, and it prompted him to propose another way that teams could increase ticket revenue without alienating fans as much. It turns out that Novick is a columnist for The Hardball Times, so he has posted his idea in his column.
“I think it shows how Cornell graduate students can have an impact on Cornell undergraduates,” wrote Cawley, “and also how the Internet allows Cornell undergrads to share what they learn at Cornell with others.”
– Susan S. Lang