Providing Consistent Service at the Concession Stands: An Exploratory Study

Concession sales are a critical revenue stream for sport and entertainment venues. Most research investigating concession revenues has focused upon quality and availability of food choices as well as the servicescape (Bigelow, 2004; Zeithaml, Bitner, and Gremler, 2006). Though these are important areas of concern, one area that has not been extensively researched is the appearance, speed, and efficiency of individual concession stations in relation to their in-venue counterparts. This study investigated the consistency of concession operations at a National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I men’s basketball game. Results indicated that a discrepancy existed among concession outlets in regards to physical appearance and speed of customer transactions

NIL “Reform” Fails to Address the NCAA’s Biggest Issue

Do college sport stakeholders have the intellectual and moral courage to abandon the familiar and financially successful, but morally bankrupt and exploitative, collegiate model? The NIL Reform, which effectively fails to address the NCAA\u27s biggest issue, is explored in this article

Washington Redskins -Disparaging Term or Valuable Tradition?: Legal and Economic Issues Concerning Harjo v. Pro-Football, Inc.

I\u27ll never change the name of the Redskins. You have my word on that. In addition to that, it\u27s really what the Redskins mean that\u27s not quite out there.., what it means is tradition. It means winning. It means a great tradition for the franchise. -Daniel Snyder (owner of the Washington Redskins). A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. -Thomas Paine

Who Are Our Fans: An Application of Principal Component-Cluster Technique Analysis to Market Segmentation of College Football Fans

A 66-question online marketing survey of 2,800 football fans who had purchased tickets to a Division I, Power 5 (P5) university football game was conducted in order to understand the fan base and provide better services and targeted marketing. Principal Component Analysis was employed to combine responses from multiple questions about purchase behavior, on-site satisfaction, demographics, and other criteria. Subsequent market segmentation via cluster analysis indicated that 95% of the survey respondents could be categorized into one of five clusters. The identified fan perceptions and evaluations resulted in the P5 athletic department taking specific actions to improve targeted marketing activities and enhance game-day experiences, including improving the quality and diversity of food offerings, ensuring smoother ingress and egress, offering more precise ticket packages, and targeting groups through relevant marketing channels. The current research notes the importance of utilizing precision marketing efforts to target specific clusters and then providing appropriate tangible and intangible products and services to maximize initial sales, improve fan experience, and increase the likelihood of repeat purchases

Variable Ticket Pricing in Major League Baseball

Sport teams historically have been reluctant to change ticket prices during the season. Recently, however, numerous sport organizations have implemented variable ticket pricing in an effort to maximize revenues. In Major League Baseball variable pricing results in ticket price increases or decreases depending on factors such as quality of the opponent, day of the week, month of the year, and for special events such as opening day, Memorial Day, and Independence Day. Using censored regression and elasticity analysis, this article demonstrates that variable pricing would have yielded approximately $590,000 per year in additional ticket revenue for each major league team in 1996, ceteris paribus. Accounting for capacity constraints, this amounts to only about a 2.8$1.4 million in revenue. The largest percentage revenue gain would have been the San Francisco Giants. The Giants would have seen an estimated 6.7% increase in revenue had they used optimal variable pricing

Creativity and Autonomy in Swarm Intelligence Systems

This work introduces two swarm intelligence algorithms -- one mimicking the behaviour of one species of ants (\emph{Leptothorax acervorum}) foraging (a `Stochastic Diffusion Search', SDS) and the other algorithm mimicking the behaviour of birds flocking (a `Particle Swarm Optimiser', PSO) -- and outlines a novel integration strategy exploiting the local search properties of the PSO with global SDS behaviour. The resulting hybrid algorithm is used to sketch novel drawings of an input image, exploliting an artistic tension between the local behaviour of the `birds flocking' - as they seek to follow the input sketch - and the global behaviour of the `ants foraging' - as they seek to encourage the flock to explore novel regions of the canvas. The paper concludes by exploring the putative `creativity' of this hybrid swarm system in the philosophical light of the `rhizome' and Deleuze's well known `Orchid and Wasp' metaphor