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that when you look at how college athletic department officials make business decisions, they act a lot like their professional counterparts even though the athletic departments are legally non-profit organizations. But being non-profit in a legal sense doesn鈥檛 mean that you, as a decision-maker, can鈥檛 have maximum net revenue as an objective. It just restricts how you can distribute the excess revenue.

on college ticket pricing that I paste in its entirety below.

of Duke University has a book coming out soon, called Big-Time Sports in American Universities. He offers examples of a number of schools that have great teams in one major sport (for example, football), and mediocre teams in another (say, basketball). For their mediocre team, the arena is often half-empty, even though the ticket price is quite reasonable. There is excess supply. For the powerhouse team, the ticket price is also reasonable鈥攂ut at that price there is a huge excess demand for seats.

How to remove the shortage and equilibrate the market? Simple: at one school, the price of a pair of season tickets is $1,000; to be eligible to pay this amount, one must make an annual 鈥渃haritable gift鈥� of $7,000 to the university. Presumably this contribution is sufficient to equilibrate supply and demand. I find this quite disgusting鈥攂ut I suppose it is more desirable for the university to earn the revenue than to have speculators profit by purchasing the tickets and then re-selling them at the market price, although I would bet that some season ticket-holders do scalp tickets on games that they can鈥檛 attend for personal reasons.

What he鈥檚 referring to is the two-part tariff that is so common in business these days. With a two-part tariff, a person pays a flat fee to essentially get the right to buy a product and then has to pay again buy the product. It鈥檚 away to obtain higher profits. Sam鈥檚 Club uses a two part tariffs and so do professional sports team (only there they are called 鈥減ersonal seat licenses鈥�. These donations Hamermesh writes about are no different, except for the fact that what you are buying is not just the right to buy tickets to one sport, but multiple sports.

When I was a student at Mizzou in the 90鈥檚, the athletic department sold what was called an 鈥淎ll Sports Pass.鈥� The All Sports Pass cost somewhere between $200 and $250 and gave students access to all sporting events except for men鈥檚 basketball*, which was the premier sport at Mizzou back then. For men鈥檚 basketball, the pass put you into a lottery for reserved seating. If you chose not to particiate in the lottery, then you got nose-bleed section GA seats. If you participated in the lottery, you鈥檇 get, depending on your lottery number, your choice of seats with more desirable seats being more expensive, just like in the pros.

Any student who didn鈥檛 buy the pass would have to pay the usual student admission price to get into any sporting events, even the non-revenue sports. But students with the passes got into the non-revenue sports鈥� games for no extra charge. My sense was this was a way to maximize attendance, and thus profits, for the athletic department as a whole.

As far as Hamermesh鈥檚 comment that the practice of requiring donations being 鈥渄isgusting鈥�, I don鈥檛 share that feeling probably because I obtain greater satisfaction from sports than Hamermesh (although I don鈥檛 personally know Dan) and have willingly bought tickets to college sporting events for almost 20 years now.

Whatever our relative feelings are on sports, amateur status or not, college sporting events have a scarce number of tickets available and those tickets need to be rationed in some way, which Hamermesh seems to reluctantly admit.

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