The Pricing of Tickets to Metal Concerts

In Principles of Microeconimics, students learn that when a firm maximizes profits, it does so when the marginal revenue earned from selling the "last" unit equals its marginal cost.  As long as it is costly to sell at the margin, the firm has no interest in generating maximum revenue because doing so would push profits lower.

An interesting counter-example comes from sports.  Sports facilities are generally club goods, which means that people can be excluded from entrance but that entrance is non-rival up to the point of capacity.  In less fancy terms, once the facility is built, it costs virtually nothing to allow one more fan through the door.  Sports teams face costs like payroll and stadium maintenance, but those are fixed costs in relation to the number of tickets sold.  In other words, the marginal cost of letting each fan in is virtually zero.

But is the marginal cost always zero?  Not in the case of rowdy fans, and there is a case here in Mankato that has some local authorities worried about a future event.

A hard rock concert that drew one of the largest crowds ever to the Alltel Center in February also brought some problems.

Several people had to be treated by ambulance staff or taken to the hospital, police responded to more than two dozen incidents in or around the Alltel Center during the concert and Alltel security staff dealt with something they weren’t used to: a mosh pit full of bouncing, bumping and bashing fans.

...The group, which also includes representatives from Gold Cross Ambulance and Deputy Director of Police Services Matt Westermayer, has a few weeks to plan before Slipknot comes to Mankato May 13. Slipknot is expected to draw the same type of raucous fans the Buckcherry and Papa Roach concert did on Feb. 13.

To me this seems a case where the marginal cost of letting fans in would be above zero and is not unlike the problems faced by soccer clubs under threat of hooliganism.  Economic theory predicts that the higher the marginal cost, the higher prices will be.  So all else held equal, if metal fans (like myself, although I prefer "classic" metal* bands) are rowdier that fans of other types of music, they will face higher ticket prices and therefore "pay for" their rowdiness. 

This is also a testable hypothesis with the "right" data, but I don't know if anyone has tested it.

*This just another way of me saying I'm old.