Ticketing analytics isn't my main focus area, but I wanted to alert people to another sports analytics contest out there. 

The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania has a program called the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative, in which one of their corporate partners shares their dataset and solicits research proposals from the analytics community to answer business questions that they have.  This Friday the Initiative will have an online presentation by Stubhub where they will present data related to relationship marketing issues that they would like to investigate.  Below is a further description of the opportunity:

The Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative (formerly WIMI) announces the next WCAI Research Opportunity which will be sponsored by StubHub (www.stubhub.com). StubHub, the leading destination for fans seeking tickets to live events, seeks to go beyond computing conversion rates for individual email campaigns to exploring the longer-term effects of their relationship marketing activities on customers' future transactions. They will provide complete histories of e-mails, targeted promotional offers and transactions for a sample of their customers. During the observation window, StubHub launched a new relationship marketing program that included more aggressive targeted promotions with randomly selected holdout groups. StubHub is interested in understanding how these promotions affect customer behavior, whether some of the older customers who haven't purchased lately can be revived by these campaigns and whether there is a longer-term downside to "communicating too much" with their customers.

Information on targeted promotions will include a detailed description of the discount or promotion offered as well as the criteria used to select customers to receive the offer. Customer transaction histories will include detailed information about what type of tickets were purchased as well as customer's self-reported preferences for locations, teams and artists. In addition to e-mail offers and transactions, the data will include records of "near purchases", events where the customer has selected a lot of tickets to purchase but fails to complete the transaction.

So if you're interested, follow this link to register for the webinar.  The webinar starts Friday at 1500 Eastern time (1200 Pacific), or 1900 GMT.