Dynamic Pricing in Major League Baseball Tickets: Issues and Challenges

A rapidly growing trend in the business of professional sports is the use of dynamic pricing as a tool for maximizing revenue generation. Dynamic pricing (DP) is defined as a system in which prices respond to supply and demand pressures in a real time (or nearly real time) manner (Sahay 2007). American Airlines is credited with the first widespread use of DP as a pricing tool to handle the mismatches in supply and demand for certain flights (McAfee & te Velde 2006). DP has spread to numerous other industries, including entertainment, hotels, manufacturing to order, and lately, to Major League Baseball.