Comment by LeoPanthera
3 days ago
The UK is proposing a law that will make it illegal to resell a ticket for greater than the face value.
That honestly seems like a very pragmatic solution to me.
3 days ago
The UK is proposing a law that will make it illegal to resell a ticket for greater than the face value.
That honestly seems like a very pragmatic solution to me.
I don't know how naive the actual wording is, but fighting these kind of resells is an arms race.
If for instance they allow reselling the ticket at the same price, processing fees could be exempted from that calculation. So charging the nominal price, but with enormous fees that go to the seller's pocket in a roundabout way will work.
If processing fees are caped, the seller can request payment through a middle item that is nominally valued the same as the ticket but can actually be paid for more.
Or the reseller will accept generous tips in exchange for the ticket at the nominal price. etc. etc.
As long as there's someone willing to pay, money will find the way to the reseller.
Except you are losing yourself in technicalities, technicalities which court will not care about. Most judicial systems (including UK) are based on both letter AND spirit of the law : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_and_spirit_of_the_law
Most courts will not convict your only for your actions but for the intention that fulfilled your actions. That's also why in most countries, murder and attempted murder will have the same consequences.
So you can hide your fees however you want, the court will interpret your intentions, and you'll have a hard time justifying your $250 processing fee for reselling a concert ticket.
Enforcement of small-scale commerce is hard, black markets exist, people will go advertise on shady sites if they have to.
Imagine you've instituted this ban, and some concert has face-value $100 tickets that now have $400 market value. The reality isn't going to be "there's now lots of $100 tickets available on StubHub", it's going to be "StubHub has no tickets, and some shady black-market website has tickets available for $400 with no consumer protections".
That said, I'm not totally against this world, since all of these inconveniences will add friction and make it less attractive and profitable to buy and scalp lots of tickets. But since I often find out about concerts kind of late, I'm also happy that there's tickets available for me at any price. I'd probably end up going to fewer concerts if we killed the legal resale market.
Ireland has this and honestly I hate it now. It's impossible to get tickets unless you win the lottery to buy them when they first go on sale. Paying a premium to buy them on the second hand market sucked, but at least I could make that calculation and decide which bands I was willing to pay to actually see. Now, I can't see any of the big bands anymore. I just wish they'd reserve like 1/3 of the tickets for an auction system or something.
Well it seems like it’s still an excellent idea to have laws like this in place but like you say also have some tickets that sell at an auctioned price
Seems like that would be an easy thing to bypass. Include a free ticket with some overpriced merchandise. £600 for a T-shirt, but you get a free ticket with it.
See there : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48233142
So the scalpers will move to the black market and consumers will lose all existing protections? Nice!
Some scalpers will move to the black market. Most will quit. People dont want to go to jail.
Will depend entirely on enforcement I guess
"Great news, gentlemen! We've made [drugs/gambling/guns/scalping] illegal! That problem is solved!"
Perfect is the enemy of good. If a law can end the easier parts of the problem then the overwhelming majority of the issues go away.
For example, the UK banned the private ownership of 'short guns' in 1997 and there hasn't been a mass shooting since. The second order effect of that was an increase in knife crime, but that's OK (in the sense that it's another problem to deal with). Trading fighting gun crime for fighting knife crime is a huge win if it removes a problem like random mass shootings.
In this case, removing all of the incentives for legal ticket scalping at source would mean people can mostly benefit from access to tickets. The second order effects are likely to be an increase in ticket prices because now people with more money will be willing to pay more at source, and an increase in 'sniping' services that automate buying as fast as possible. Those are acceptable downsides if it removes people from the market who only skim profits by scalping and offer no useful additions.
The UK has done amazingly well at removing short guns from society. It was perhaps erroneous of me to include that.
But do you really think that selling/having illicitly overpriced concert tickets will have the same domestic ire as illicitly selling/having a short gun does? Will the incentive really be gone?
Or do you think that perhaps it will be seen ~the same as selling/having some weed is, instead?
1 reply →
This seems unnecessarily cynical.
It may be the case that your perspective differs from my own. I've gambled, and bought drugs, and done all kinds of other illegal things in my life.
I knew that it was illegal. I did it anyway.
I haven't bought or sold any illegally-overpriced concert tickets yet, but I'm not yet done living my life, either.
Good example. In the U.K. many guns are illegal and schools don’t get shot up. In the us they are legal and school frequently get shot up.