On Sunday, August 19th, the Detroit Tigers and the New York Yankees played baseball at Yankee stadium. Both teams are in a pursuit of league championships. Tickets to the game were sold out, and many more fans would have attended if additional tickets had been available. On the same day, the Cleveland Indians and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays played each other and sold tickets to 22,500 people in Tampa.
The Devil Ray stadium, Tropicana Field, holds 43,772. Yankee stadium holds 57,478. Assume for simplicity that all regular season games are priced at $40.
a. Draw supply and demand curves for the tickets to each of the two games. (Hint: Supply is fixed; it does not change with price.) Draw one graph for each game.
b. Is there a pricing policy that would have filled the ballpark for the Tampa game?
c. The price system was not allowed to ration the New York tickets when they were initially sold to the public. How do you know? How do you suppose the tickets were rationed?