Research
Market gravity: why some cities are routinely skipped
Routing decisions are economic, not editorial. Modelling them makes it possible to say which markets are underserved and by how much.
- Authors
- Published
- Updated
Contributions
- Live Index Research Desk — Research, Routing record collection
When a tour skips a city, the explanation offered locally is usually cultural. The actual explanation is generally a routing budget: the marginal cost of adding the market exceeded the expected marginal return, given where the tour already had to be.
Modelling pull
Market gravity estimates the attractiveness of a market to a routing decision, holding artist size constant, from population, venue supply at the relevant capacity band, travel cost from adjacent markets, and historical attendance.
Residuals are the interesting part
Cities that receive substantially less activity than the model predicts are underserved in a specific, measurable sense. That residual is a far more useful input to local advocacy than a comparison with a larger city that has different fundamentals.
Publishing the model
The model is published in full, including coefficients and specification. A routing model that cannot be contested is not evidence; it is an assertion with arithmetic attached.
Sources and citations
Publication record
The structured record for this document. Classification is drawn from the Live Index controlled vocabulary so relationships between people, subjects, places and measurements stay consistent across the platform.
- Content type
- Market Paper
- Primary topic
- Touring
- Secondary topics
- Economic ImpactUrban DevelopmentTourism
- Themes
- AccessMarket HealthLocalismParticipation
- Economic concepts
- DemandVariable CostsNetwork EffectsSupply Constraints
- Data portrait
- Routing pull between unevenly weighted markets · field
- Methodology
- What we measure
Corrections and revisions
No corrections have been issued for this document. Substantive errors are corrected on this page, dated and retained.