Broadway and Dynamic Ticket Pricing

This story in the New York Times describes how dynamic ticket pricing is helping some Broadway shows stay profitable despite an economic downturn and decreasing attendance.

Variable ticket pricing allows theaters to change prices for seats according to week-to-week or even day-to-day trends that represent fluctuations in supply-and-demand.

According to the article, the theater industry experimented with dynamic pricing during some touring company productions and collected enough data to build a pricing model that could predict weekly box-office demand.  The success of the model allowed them to implement dynamic pricing on Broadway, where they can now adjust prices to optimize sales and profits.

Dynamic pricing has long been used in the airline industry, where ticket prices seem to fluctuate almost randomly as a function of time.  And last year, even the San Francisco Giants experimented a bit with dynamic pricing for their baseball games!

An interesting, and innovative, way to optimize revenue!