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email updates E-mail: You Paid HOW MUCH for a Ticket to the Game? January 28, 2020 BLS Commissioner I hear there is a big game coming up soon, and ticket prices are pretty high (and I’m not talking about the Washington Nationals’ Opening Day). So I reached out to the BLS experts on the Consumer Price Index (CPI) to learn a little more about how we handle the change in the price of sporting event tickets. We hear the face value of a ticket to a certain high-profile game is X, but then we hear the cost on the secondary market is Y (often several times X). But what if the game features a major-market team or a high-profile player, versus a game with less well-known teams or players? What if heavy rains are predicted for an outdoor game, or the halftime entertainer has recently encountered some social-media scandal? How can the CPI account for such differences when determining the rate of change in the price of a ticket? What I learned It turns out that BLS has experts in the price of sporting event tickets, and the experts know lots of answers—and know more questions we could explore. BLS even has detailed instructions for determining the price of tickets to sporting events—17 pages of instructions! Sporting events are a subset of the CPI item category “Admissions,” which also includes movies and concerts. Here’s a chart showing the annual rate of change in the price of admission to sporting events over the past 20 years. Editor’s note: Data for this chart are available in the table below. Constant quality A basic principle behind the CPI is what’s known as the matched model . That is, we want to determine the price of comparable ( matched ) items from one time period to the next. The fancy CPI term for this is constant quality . This means we have to carefully identify the characteristics of the item we choose to study, with the goal of keeping those characteristics constant each time we determine the price. The source of tickets included in the CPI sample can include both individual sports franchises (such as the Mudville nine ) and ticket resellers. In all cases we want to determine the price of a ticket based on a variety of price-determining factors that we hope to hold constant over time. For example: Admission type, such as adult versus child, but also individual tickets versus season tickets or a multigame ticket plan. When we follow the price of season tickets, we do so during a limited time of the year. For exam...