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Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

If you in any way sell tickets for less than the true market value, people will find a way to take advantage of that.

The only solution is to sell the tickets at market value from the start. Then there is no profit to be made by resellers.

Edit: Well there might be still some "market making" business in buying and selling, since inevitably there will be people who end up not being able to use the tickets they bought but don't want to stand outside the venue trying to sell them themselves. But the margins will be much smaller.

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No, that's not the only solution. The other solution is to make the tickets non-transferable. Require those at the gate to present their ticket along with a piece of photo ID matching the name on the ticket. Problem solved.

Yes, this is what Louis CK does. And I was so pleased to go see him from the 15th row recently for $50 that I am going again in September. It's not logistically impossible by any stretch.

So, in order for me to feel happy about the artist's keeping-it-real credentials I have to give up the freedom to resell my ticket? No thanks.

Seats at performances are scarce resources. We have an efficient and fair mechanism for allocating scarce resources: the market. Raise ticket prices to the market-clear price and be done with it.

Making the tickets non-transferable changes the offer. The market still applies, it merely reduces the value of the ticket and brings it closer into line with the price.

Charging market rates for the tickets means some popular events will go for thousands of dollars. Artists don't want their fan demographics to get skewed by that.

Why not? We've already learned that they make most of their money from concerts. Why not cultivate a wealthy fanbase to attend expensive concerts?

Because, past a certain point, recording artists usually care more about other issues besides money. Having your loyal fanbase of screaming, ecstatic teenage girls replaced by a bunch of rich old men in suits sounds like a real buzzkill to me.

They can (and usually do!) pay those girls to attend in the front section. The market is great brcause it has general mechanisms to solve all these problems: everyone pays for what they want.

But then what happens in those - admittedly very rare - cases when you can't attend the even, and you wish to legitimately hand your ticket over to your friend/family...and then both lose out due to the need for id validation? (I'll admit i don't have the answer, i'm just trying to say that there could be reasonable use-cases for transferring a ticket.)

The original seller could accept the ticket back (and, for convenience, perhaps provide a remote cancellation process that is equivalent without returning a physical ticket) which makes it available for sale again by the issuer, who could offer a refund to the first purchaser contingent on the ticket being resold.

For underpriced tickets, that basically creates a lottery: everyone rushes to buy a ticket the second they go on sale, and some lucky fraction get one. If you're busy at that minute or your computer craps out or you're just part of the vast unlucky majority, you don't get a ticket. That doesn't seem like a fair way of getting tickets to the people who want them.

That problem is easily solved as well! Just let everybody put in a deposit for a ticket ahead of time and select the lucky winners by lottery. Anybody who doesn't win gets their money back.

I meant that a lottery is an unfair way of allocating tickets.

If the price is below market value, there will be more willing buyers than tickets. A lottery seems the fairest way to address this imbalance. (I mean a true lottery like the grandparent suggests, not one of which TCP connections will time out.)

I would even go so far as to say that a lottery is the fairest way regardless of the price or market value. Charging a very high price that only a few people could afford would negate the need for a lottery but it wouldn't be fair.

Could you elaborate on the "regardless of the price" part of that? Are you saying that popular tickets should always just be allocated by lottery? Would you say that about other scarce goods (e.g. last-minute plane tickets), or is there something different about tickets?

My point is that society itself is unfair due to vast wealth inequality. From that basis, a fair system cannot occur if it depends on unequal wealth to allocate its scarce resources. It is a case of leveraging an advantage from one area into another.

The underpricing is the core problem. We're trying to assign tickets to people, so the question is what rules to use to do the assignment. A typical price system is one set of rules (and IMO the best one). Some kind of contest where people show off how badly they want a ticket would be another option. Or maybe you could base it on how frequently someone's bought tickets in the past. There are of course lots of other options too.

The point is to get the tickets to the people who want them the most. I think a lottery does a poor job of that.

Auction pricing gives tickets to people who have highest paying jobs. Unless pricing is a progressive %of income, it isn't indicating who wants to go the most.

Do you have a system in mind that would be more fair?

That limited "market making" wouldn't even be necessary if refunds were allowed. By not allowing official refunds, patrons with unwanted tickets are forced to participate in the shady secondary market.

Seems like if they sell out, they should give refunds and resell to people on the waiting list.

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