Ticket Price Behavior and Attendance Demand in Chinese Professional Soccer

Abstract

There exists diverse research examining the attendance at professional sporting events from a North American and European perspective (Watanabe, Int J Sport Finance 7: 309-323, 2012). However, there are a limited number of studies that have considered attendance for sporting leagues and events in Asia, with most of these studies focused on the Nippon Professional Baseball League (Leeds and Sakata, J Sports Econ 13: 34-52, 2012; Yamamura and Shin, J Socio-Econ 37: 14121426, 2008; Appl Econ 41: 3257-3265, 2009). This research examines attendance for professional soccer in the Chinese Super League (CSL) over an entire season. Analysis of this league is of great interest because of the unique pricing structures employed by various franchises that belong to the CSL. Specifically, several CSL franchises employ only a single price point for a ticket to their match, while major professional sport leagues in North America and Europe offer multiple prices at which to enter matches. The practice of price dispersion, the selling of tickets to a single event at different price levels, in the CSL provides researchers with the chance to examine how teams employing different pricing practices in a league may affect attendance. Price dispersion theory indicates that the use of multiple prices for a product should allow a firm to capture more consumer surplus, and previous empirical examinations have found evidence of increased demand or revenues for organizations using price dispersion (Humphreys and Soebbing, Econ Lett 114: 304-307, 2012; Huntington, J Cult Econ 17: 71-87, 1993). This chapter will thus test whether price dispersion has a positive relationship with attendance in the CSL.