Forbes: "Purple Pricing: Northwestern Finds A Solution to the Flawed Way College Football Teams Sell Tickets"
By: Kevin Trahan
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The answer was a new system called Purple Pricing. The idea was that prices would start high, and they would fall in accordance with demand and the secondary market. Unlike dynamic pricing, where prices can rise and fall and customers are stuck with the price they pay, tickets under the "Purple Pricing" plan would only fall, and customers would be refunded to pay the lowest possible price. The concept is similar to a Dutch Auction. The system debuted for two games during the 2012-13 basketball season, and it opened for select, high-demand football games starting in 2013.
“We're trying to figure out and learn as much as we can about how we can price tickets fairly," former Northwestern director of marketing Shawn Sullivan said after the meeting, "and how can we effectively keep the revenues so they don’t go to the secondary market as much as possible?”
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