Today the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times report on statements from the Metropolitan Opera regarding recent changes in prices and box office revenues. The WSJ reports, under the headline "Met Opera Suffers Budget Shortfall From Pricing Backlash": The Metropolitan Opera's $311 million budget fell short by $2.8 million last year, after a ticket price increase backfired and caused attendance to drop, according to a newly released financial-disclosure document. Last February, Met officials announced a … [Read more...]
Archives for 2014
The sunk cost fallacy
It is great to be back at Artsjournal, after a fall semester of teaching a couple of courses, taking an introductory course in Mandarin, finishing up some academic papers and, most relevant to this space, completing a manuscript of a book on strategic pricing in the arts. I'll give updates as that moves along. For now, I plan on getting back to regular posting, and I welcome suggestions for any questions on pricing in the arts that might occur to you. To get started, I came across this article in the journal Psychological Science by Andrew … [Read more...]