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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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