Kirby on Finance

Cheap World Series Tickets for Those Who Wait

I’m not sure how many of you are baseball fans, but getting to see a World Series game probably has some appeal to most of us. As a Braves fan, I never had the chance to make it to any of their previous appearances in the World Series, but I was lucky enough to catch several of their playoff appearances (those were the days!). Normally, I’ll do a quick check on Ticketmaster to see if there are any tickets available and if not, I usually resolve to find a scalper (where legal, of course) or a friend that might have a ticket to spare.

Well, if you’re interesting in seeing a World Series game this year, don’t worry - it’s a good thing you haven’t bought a ticket yet. Andrew Sweeting did some ticket price analysis for a research paper and determined that ticket prices actually decrease as game-time draws near.

Sweeting has meticulously crunched the data on baseball ticket sales for 2007 on StubHub.com, and he cross-checked his analysis with data from another (anonymized) online source. He documents a rather striking fact: the prices of baseball tickets tend to fall through time.

So here’s my advice: If you are looking to buy World Series tickets, you should wait until a day or two before the game. In fact, as the graph below shows, this may yield savings of 25 percent, or more!

When to Buy World Series Tickets [Justin Wolfers/Freakonomics Blog]

Using Game Theory on Children!

Back when I was working on my economics major, I always found game theory to be the most interesting subject we covered.  It always makes for great conversation when you’re around a bunch of pseudo-intellectuals who pride themselves in appearing to be smarter than they actually are.  So, you could imagine that when I stumbled upon the Unknown Professor’s post about using game theory to end an endless debate amongst his two children over what book to have read to them at night, I was one happy pseudo-intellectual.

I’ll try not to steal the Professor’s thunder with the specifics of how the whole process worked out, but I will say that it was successful.  I’d be curious to see if this would work on other people’s children – maybe a new parenting style is in order?

Using Game Theory on Your Kids  [Financial Rounds]