ASA Datafest 2016 @ UCLA - 2nd Place

ASA DataFest at UCLA is a data hackathon for undergraduate students, sponsored by the American Statistical Association. It is a weekend long problem-solving challenge where student teams are given real data and expected to come up with actionable solutions.

Competition Overview:

Data Sponsor: Ticketmaster
Data Provided: 3 Datasets about User Behaviour, Purchase Details, and Adwords Spend
Topics of Focus: Marketing Optimization, True Fan identification, and Price Optimization

Our Thesis:

We wanted to focus on price and revenue-related issues. We decided to analyze how Ticketmaster was pricing and what factors were determining or not determining the price of a ticket per venue per locale. We operated on solving the below three questions.

Is Ticketmaster taking into regional factors when determining price?
If not, what happens if they do?
What are the implications towards the business & pricing when they do?

Our Approach:

Combine User and Sales datasets
Clean data set + convert data to be by zip codes
Add matching external census/financial data
Check if regional factors affect price (FALSE)
Use normalized statistic to identify overpriced/underpriced U.S. counties
Create flag
Calculate location premium/discounts
Visualize over map + bar charts

Tools Used:

SAS for joining the large datasets
R for cleaning the combined data, data manipulation, and factor building
Tableau for visualizing and presenting data

Final Presentation Slides (click to view next):

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2The first 3 slides show the US counties where there were identified mispricing per each major event classification (Concerts, Arts, Sports). The last 3 slides show the appropriate price markup or discount per country to make the price appropiate for that locale.

Applications/Impact to Business:

Allows Ticketmaster to properly price per US country per local economic factors.
Increase in sales without losing demand because affordability does not diminish, and having location markdowns allows you to create an affordable price range for the locality and thereby generate demand & sales.
Develop a loyal customer base with their true target market which are local consumers (people nearby the venue).

We were awarded 2nd Place in the External Data Category!