League scheduling and game bundling in sports industry

Abstract

Most sport clubs offer season tickets first and they allow purchasing single tickets at a later date. There are several decision problems within this context; the determination of the optimal time at which the switch from bundled tickets to single tickets should occur, the decision of which event tickets to include into the bundle depending on the schedule of the team and the creation of a league schedule enabling revenue enhancements from game bundling. In this paper we have focused on the last decision problem. We analyze league scheduling and game bundling decisions together for a double round robin tournament in order to maximize the total revenue generated by all of the participating teams in the league. A heuristic method is offered which utilizes the approximate expected revenue values obtained by revenue increase and decrease patterns of bundled tickets. We test the offered heuristic’s performance and observe significant benefits numerically.