[jmknpk2]

The way I figure it, if my stadium sells out. There were people who would have bought a ticket but couldn't. Price was too low. If I didn't sell out, price was too high. Because I'm capped out at sellout, I can't see how many I might have sold. If I am slightly below sellout, I can track the different attendances against different prices (paying close attention to fan interest, day of week, etc.). Slightly below sellout just gives me a better handle on the correlation. With a sellout, I don't know how much higher I could have raised the ticket price and still sold out.

I see it in the economics supply and demand curve way. If the demand is higher than the supply (at specified cost), I've lost money. If the supply is too high (at a given cost), I've exceeded the demand. If I could walk the line perfectly every game, I would where demand = supply. At a price where raising ticket price one penny would lose a ticket purchase. And if I had lowered the price one penny for a sellout, I could have sold out for one more penny per ticket.

But because game by game attendance is unpredictable, I aim for the next best thing: selling one less seat than capacity. Or something generally along those lines as described in my original post (95% on weekdays 100% on weekends).

In a 50,000 capacity stadium, if I sell out at $20 per ticket, then I've brought in $1,000,000 for the game. If I sell 49,999 seats at $20.01, I've brought in $1,000,479.99. Simple math shows the difference.

I tracked (in a spreadsheet) my ticket revenue game-by-game, over the entire course of seasons, before we were allowed to change the price game by game. That's where I developed the strategy. Now that we can change the price daily, I've refined it a bit.