story by Claire Miller
When someone purchases tickets online for a concert, a comedy show or a sporting event, they’ll often see something called partitioned pricing: A listing of their ticket’s base price, the fees/surcharges that they’ll have to pay and the total cost.
The partitioned pricing method gives consumers an understanding of how their ticket costs are calculated and shows how fees factor into the final price.
College of Education & Human Development Professor Beth Cianfrone and CEHD alum Armin Marquez (M.S. ’16, Ph.D. ’20) co-authored a 2024 study in the International Journal of Sport Management and Marketing to better understand how baseball fans feel about partitioned pricing and paying fees to see their favorite teams play.
“The purpose of this study was to investigate fans' offer assessment (i.e., perceived value) based on ticket price level, fans’ attribution of fee responsibility to teams and fans’ perceptions that fees were reasonable when completing digital purchases,” they wrote. “Within the sport industry, understanding if consumers consider teams to bear responsibility for added surcharges, and their perceptions of reasonableness toward these charges within a ticket purchase, can provide valuable insight to ticketing managers engaging in partitioned pricing.”
Cianfrone and Marquez screened possible study participants to ensure they’d attended one or more Major League Baseball (MLB) games during the most recent season and could answer a few basic baseball questions. Three hundred sixty-seven participants were selected to participate in the study, where they used an online ticket purchasing simulation to buy two regular-season tickets for their favorite baseball team.
After choosing their favorite team, they were shown a map of the team’s stadium and given three different ticket offers with pricing similar to that of an MLB stadium in the southeastern U.S.:
- Ticket Package 1: $16 plus a $9.10 fee (worth 28.4 percent of the base ticket price)
- Ticket Package 2: $57 plus a $17.10 fee (worth 15 percent of the base ticket price)
- Ticket Package 3: $130 plus a $23.10 fee (worth 8.9 percent of the base ticket price)
After making their final selections, participants were asked to recall the base price for their tickets and complete a series of questions about the purchasing process.
Seventy-two participants selected the least expensive ticket package, 233 selected the middle one and 72 selected the most expensive one. On average, participants “perceived the ticket offer as slightly positive, believed MLB teams profit from fees and believed the fees to be unreasonable.”
Cianfrone and Marquez found that participants’ perceptions of the overall ticket price weren’t significantly different at the three pricing options, even though the fees at each ticket level were worth very different percentages of the tickets’ base price. “Nevertheless, perceptions of value were, on average, low,” the authors wrote. “This may be explained by the fact that regardless of fans’ evaluation of the offer, they are highly likely to search for alternative options before completing their purchase.”
They also found that participants who thought the fees were unreasonable ascribed less value to their tickets than those who felt the fees were reasonable.
“These findings were consistent with previous partitioned pricing studies, which highlight that when consumers perceive fees to be too high, it resulted in negative perceptions toward the offer,” the authors wrote. “Although fans’ attachment may result in some leniency toward particular actions, fans will draw a line when they feel that their team is unreasonable, impacting their perceptions of value.”
After Cianfrone and Marquez published their study in 2024, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) approved its new Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees, which affects how sport organizations display their prices and disclose fees.
The rule requires that the total price for live events be made clear to consumers up front, including all fees except "taxes or other government charges, shipping charges and charges for optional goods or services people may select to buy as part of the same transaction," according to the FTC's frequently asked questions page.