Fans Watch Taylor Swift. Economists Watch the Fans
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You had to give your name to buy the ticket, and you could only buy two. Then upon arrival at the venue, you got in line, went through security, and then went to will call. At that point you couldn't leave the venue. You never even took the ticket. Will call handed it to the ticket taker who let you in.
So if you were a scalper, the best you could do is scalp your second ticket and then attend the concert with the person you just screwed with an overpriced ticket.
Maybe it works for the 20,000-seat arenas NIN plays in, but it sure didn't work for a 54,000-seat stadium.
[1] http://vancouversun.com/entertainment/music/big-crowd-for-u2...
They were just too cheap to use the full capacity.
I had the same problem at the U2 concert in Santa Clara. 1/2 the doors were closed.
Easy and safe reselling of tickets should be possible, at ideally no cost to the person reselling the ticket. I think this would be a nice feature of a consumer friendly platform, and a necessary mechanism in order to make the "link ticket to name" approach be fair.
This is also known as an "adult freely and willingly participating in a voluntary transaction."
But by volume of DV, I guess HN has some interesting minds here as well.
Scalpers don't do that--they don't open up that experience--they insert themselves in between the real transaction, making some bank for themselves while adding no value to either party's experience.
I'm sure you could say "but scalpers help determine the real price of the ticket, to someone willing to pay" ... we, as a society, don't want or need that help. If we, as a society, keep coming up with ways to thwart that (like the NiN thing mentioned above), that's a sign.
Markets serve us at our leisure, not the other way around.
People react to it because it violates ideas about fairness.
I'm not arguing in favor of scalping, I'm just saying that the good arguments against are about fairness, they aren't economic.
For instance, there is always the option of not attending a concert. This is not the same things as "no other options".
Sure, can be, but isn't. More often than not, it's moving the point of sale from one website to another with an absurd markup. If it's a scalper on the sidewalk selling tickets to a sold out show, then yes, they've physically moved the asset but created no more value to either the venue or the end user, only to themselves, so we're still talking about greed.
> For instance, there is always the option of not attending a concert. This is not the same things as "no other options".
The end user not going to the concert because of the ticket price means that the scalper has imposed that choice on the user.
It's also a bit much to talk about the scalper imposing anything on end users. If everyone got together and stopped buying scalped tickets, there wouldn't be any ticket scalping anymore. Except that won't work because there are plenty of people that care less about money and ticket scalping than they care about attending concerts.
Look, a scalper wouldn't command the prices they did if the demand wasn't there.
In reality, whether we like it or not, the scalper is actually facilitating price discovery. It's very clear that these tickets are worth more to people than their face value, as otherwise the scalpers would be unsuccessful.
All the scalper is doing is raising the price to what the market will bear.
Which is why this isn't about economics. It really is strictly about fairness, which is entirely orthogonal.
I'm not talking about fairness or economics, I'm talking about greed, and how a person inserts themselves into a process solely because they want money. A middleman who adds no additional value to anyone but themselves.
Today's reality: A guy discovers a band he likes is playing in town in 10 days, hops on to stubhub, and buys a ticket at 300% markup.
Your fantasy world where scalpers magically disappear: A guy discovers a band he likes is playing in town in 10 days, hops on to Ticketmaster and buys a ticket at msrp.
Actual reality if scalpers magically disappeared and prices stayed the same: A guy finds out a band he likes is playing in town in ten days and tries to buy a ticket, but he finds out that the entire concert sold out 5 months ago and he is just shit out of luck.
You may believe that a scalper holding a ticket hostage for a higher price adds no value, but the mere fact that you buy from them at all is a testament to the value they created: they held on to a ticket that you were too fucking slow to buy, and kept it out of reach to all the people who were poorer than you, and did so long enough for you to realize that the concert existed and you wanted to buy a ticket to it. And you begrudgingly admitted that that value was worth the markup you paid the minute you consented to buying it.
No, they were most likely going regardless of the ticket price, they are just less deterred by it.
Artists are the problem in this market. They should charge more (which eliminates the incentive to scalp), or play more shows (increasing the supply and lowering market prices) if they don't want to charge more.
These issues don't have perfect Econ 101 answers. Artists can't just play more shows as touring is pretty demanding, and charging more means only wealthier people can attend which (rightfully) looks bad and is a legit moral issue.
Hence the "screwing" part.
By raising the price of tickets to what the market will bear, they force some people out of the marketplace, increasing availability of tickets for those who can afford them.
And from the perspective of the artist and Ticketmaster, they eliminate some of the risk of tickets going unsold.
Of course, it's understandably seen as very unfair (goodness knows I've missed out on shows I wanted to go to because scalpers raised the price beyond the level I was willing to pay), but I wouldn't say it has no value.
TBH, I've never really understood this argument. Unless the argument is that the artist is being forced to set a lower face value, if all the tickets are sold at face value and scalped, the artist is getting exactly what they would have budgeted for.
So, are you saying the artist is being forced to sell the tickets at a price that's below what the market will bear?
If it weren't' for scalpers, the vendor would take a loss on any tickets that did not sell. Because scalpers exist, they ensure that the tickets get sold out and then the scalper takes the risk of not being able to sell the tickets.
Ticketmaster and other vendors will never get rid of scalpers because they have a very strong financial incentive not to.
I'm open to any attempts to try to limit rewarding these jerks for bad behavior, and hopefully it'll convince others to also find creative ways to limit them (like Nintendo. Mainly Nintendo).
We plan to keep 1 and use the other one as a contest prize that we'll run on Facebook once we're able to pick them up in a few weeks. We've already pre-paid and have our receipts (or "golden tickets" as the GameStop cashier called them!) The receipts have our names on them so we are the only ones allowed to pick them up.
I hope stores do more of that in the future.
But I'm not sure if anyone still cares about Klout scores. I'm not sure if they ever did, except for fun.
Any such score, used to deny service to group x based on parameters unrelated to the product itself would simply be discrimination, no?
With that out of the way in small businesses reputation can matter quite a lot. Informally many small businesses know that one guy/shop/service that is not worth having as a client. Regardless of discriminatory issues every client has varying levels of cost associated to doing business with them. So just like Credit Scores are a risk profile for how a person will handle debt. You could envision a subset of social scores as a risk profile on having someone as a business partner/client/provider based on metrics like support cost, likelihood of nickle and diming you, Contract negotiations gone wrong. That sort of thing.
Otherwise taskrabbit or something similar would probably be the best bet, or just buy a bunch of TS music and stuff from her website.
Some kind of reverse auction perhaps. Or something equally unusual.
If it always comes down to, once it's sold out, then the scalpers raise the prices, isn't it simply a question of the balance of supply and demand wanting to push the price up. So why are the event organisers leaving money on the table by pricing below the equilibrium price. Simple answer seems to be let the price rise to the equilibrium, then increase the supply by putting on more events until it falls to the level you want the price to be.
You have to complete FOUR capitalist missions, before you can get the next key for your ticket quest.
It used to be FIVE, but now it's FOUR. Made easier, for your convenience.