Certified Hit: Tony Awards, Ticket Prices, and Attendance on Broadway

Abstract

This paper asks whether Tony Awards affect Broadway ticket prices, or merely fill seats. Using a panel of 36,333 show-week observations drawn from Playbill.com weekly grosses data spanning 1996 to 2019, I estimate a two-way fixed effects model on the subsample of Tony-nominated productions, exploiting within-show variation around the annual ceremony date. I find that a Tony win generates a simultaneous 12.0% increase in average ticket price and an 11.3% increase in seats sold — a combination only consistent with an outward shift in the demand curve rather than movement along it. The revenue gain of 23.4% substantially extends prior estimates in the literature. Non-winning nominees experience significant quantity gains but negligible price effects, identifying the win — not the nomination alone — as the signal that confers pricing power. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that musicals capture larger gains at the premium end of the price distribution, while revivals realize roughly one-third the pricing benefit of original productions, consistent with a quality-certification mechanism whose value is compressed when audiences arrive with established priors. Event study estimates show flat pre-ceremony price trends, supporting the parallel trends assumption. Together, these results establish that the Tony Award functions as a credible quality certification for an experience good whose value cannot be verified before purchase — one that expands both the set of willing buyers and their individual willingness to pay.