Comment by orangecat

2 years ago

The scalper provides no value to the market

The scalper allows the devoted fan who is gladly willing to pay $X+N to actually get a ticket rather than having to wake up at 6am and repeatedly refresh the site and probably still not get one.

I find market failures like this fascinating because it really shows the limits of how "free" markets operate.

How would central planning handle this better? There are more people who want to buy a ticket at $X than there are seats available; lots of people are going to be unhappy regardless of how they get distributed.

6 comments

orangecat

Reply
varnaud  2 years ago

A devoted fan will have no issue to wake up a 6am and try to buy a ticket. They'll have more chance to get one if they don't have to compete with scalpers. Half the tickets could be sold as first arrived, first served, and half as a lottery system. The ratio might be adjusted.

If we agree that scalpers are a problem, we can make it illegal to resell ticket over the original price. Enforcement is always a problem, so to help with that it could be required to have an ID matching the ticket name and resell can only be performed on official platform.

To grantee having a ticket with this system, a wealthy or connected devoted fan can have private arrangement with the artist manager or event organizer to get tickets.

  • jjmarr  2 years ago

    > To grantee having a ticket with this system, a wealthy or connected devoted fan can have private arrangement with the artist manager or event organizer to get tickets.

    This is the system we have right now. Ticketmaster is the event organizer.

  • krupan  2 years ago

    "A devoted fan will have no issue to wake up a 6am and try to buy a ticket."

    Oh really? What if they are at work at 6am? So take a day off work? You just greatly increased the dollar cost of the ticket, which is exactly the thing you are trying not to do. And even if they take the day off to click at 6am they aren't guaranteed to get a ticket because of everyone else clicking at 6am. There's always a cost

ihumanable  2 years ago

Well just to be clear, I didn’t say central planning would solve this problem. A careful reading of my post would show a distinct lack of the term “central planning”

You can be interested in market failures without proposing an alternative. Complex systems are fascinating and their boundaries and failure conditions are fascinating. That’s all I’m talking about.