Let me start by saying that this long post is my personal opinion and has no BB or GM truths in it!
I wouldn't look that much to other teams.
It's actually quite simple. If you sell out in a type of seat, you can either raise the ticketprice, or expand that type of seats.
If you have money available, always go for the expansion. Raising ticketprices can be done if you raised a league and get a better PR manager, but I wouldn't raise them to much.
Ticketprices are limitted, and expanding can be done endlessly.
Should there be no money at the time, you can raise your ticketprices a little, but once you get some money, you can best expand and bring the ticketprices back to where they where. This will likely draw more spectators, which mostly means more money...
imo, if you have reached the max ticketprices because you would sell out otherwise, you are on the wrong track. At all times you should see to it that you have some breathing space.
to conclude here's an example:
say your arena has 10000 bleachers, and you had to raise your price to 19/seat and you just sold out last game. This would bring you 190000 cash.
Under the same circumstances, would you have 15000 bleachers available, but with the same price you would sell 10000, this would bring you 190000. BUT if your ticketprice would be 15 dollars, you would likely sell out the 15000, which would bring you 225000. You might think that it would be best then to put your price at 17, so you won't sell out, and you might draw 13000 people then, which gives you some breathing space in both ticketprice and amount of bleachers, but this would bring you 221000, which is slightly less.
Ofcourse these are not exact numbers, and maybe with 17 as price you could get slightly more, I feel confident (from my experience) that lower prices will mostly bring you more money.
UNLESS you have reached the max amount of visitors you CAN draw in your league with your PR manager... And that limit will be difficult to find, because it would be bad to find it (because this means that when you found out you passed the limit you are loosing money)
Lower prices are likely to bring more money, but don't overdo it. I'm not sure for teams that loose most of their games, but for other teams, average teams and better, I think they could best keep the ticketprice above the middle of low and high price.
Hope this helps.
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