Government Purchase of Surplus Inventory Without Price Constraints: the San Diego Chargers Ticket Guarantee

In the 1990s, the city of San Diego agreed to purchase unsold tickets to Chargers' games at the team's price. This was a short-term contract affording the team owner ample room for opportunistic rent extraction. Research and discourse tends to frame owners' constraints on subsidy rent extraction magnitude as determined heavily by lawmaker political calculus. A multi-year, uncapped, and legally binding ticket guarantee frees the owner from these constraints. Despite this, we estimate ticket prices rose 20%-30%, less than intuition might suggest. Our results suggest owners' ticket pricing behavior faces constraints exogenous to the subsidy policy process.