Description

How does the performance of a sports fan’s favorite team affect his or her likelihood of making a ticket purchase from a reseller?  Is a customer’s purchasing behavior really that elastic?

In this research, we develop a classification model of customer purchase decisions that incorporates customer interaction data for regular season events of the Big Four professional sports leagues in North America (NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB) and adds a regressor for conference rank of the customer’s team as of the event date.  We find that customer behaviors are mostly inelastic with respect to team performance at the time of a ticket purchase, and that the greatest variation in purchasing decisions corresponds with whether the customer is a seller in the secondary ticket market.  This model can be used to develop team-specific marketing strategies based on fan behavior and 1:1 customer purchase models that account for previous behavior and defaults to group purchase history for a preferred team.