Management of bundled tickets in sports and entertainment industry


Thesis Type: Doctorate

Institution Of The Thesis: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Faculty of Engineering, Department of Industrial Engineering, Turkey

Approval Date: 2013

Student: ERTAN YAKICI

Supervisor: SERHAN DURAN

Abstract:

Revenue management techniques can be used in industries where the capacity is limited and perishable, and the market can be segmented. In this work, the sales of event tickets in the sports and entertainment industry is focused, assuming tickets are sold initially as season tickets and as single tickets later in the revenue horizon. Basic decision problems within this context are the determination of optimal time at which the switch from bundled tickets to single tickets should occur and the decision of which event tickets to include into the bundle. Specifically, we study the optimal time to switch between these market segments as a function of the system state where early switch to a low-demand event is allowed. Under Poisson demand processes, it is shown that the optimal switching time is a set of time thresholds that depends on the remaining inventory and time. Numerical experiments show that profit enhancement can be obtained by deciding the optimal switch time dynamically over the case when the date of switch is announced in advance. Concerning the latter decision problem, we analyze the optimal selection of tickets for bundling and find increase and decrease patterns in total revenue as the time of bundled events change. We offer a simple heuristic method for finding profitable bundles for a given schedule. We also analyzed the revenue contribution from deciding the ticket bundling and sports league scheduling simultaneously. A heuristic method is offered which utilizes the approximate expected revenue values.