Title: Hashmoney: exploring Twitter hashtag use as a secondary ticket market price determinant

Authors: Brendan O'Hallarn; Stephen L. Shapiro; Ann Pegoraro

Addresses: Department of Communication and Theatre Arts, Old Dominion University, BAL 3013 Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia, 23529, USA ' Department of Sport and Entertainment Management, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina, USA ' Faculty of Health, School of Human Kinetics, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada

Abstract: The growth and prevalence of sport event ticket transactions on secondary ticket market platforms such as StubHub has led to the creation of a body of academic research studying this new phenomenon. Factors such as team performance and perceptions of fairness have been explored for their relationship with the price of secondary market tickets. This exploratory study introduces a new potential price determinant - social media activity - itself a popular online phenomenon that has inspired considerable academic research. This exploratory study of prices for eight National Football League games adds use of official team hashtags on Twitter to a multiple regression model, controlling for other price determinants established in previous research two models, one to predict prices for tickets sold on StubHub, the second to predict prices for tickets available on StubHub, demonstrate that increased Twitter hashtag use is a significant positive predictor of ticket prices on the secondary market.

Keywords: Twitter hashtags; National Football League; NFL; StubHub; sport tickets; social media.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSMM.2018.091754

International Journal of Sport Management and Marketing, 2018 Vol.18 No.3, pp.199 - 219

Accepted: 17 Aug 2016
Published online: 15 May 2018 *

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