How Penny Arcade manages PAX tickets
geekwire.com
geekwire.com
I think they're missing out on the fact that the alternative is having to check PAX ticket availability for all eternity. Scalping is apparently a huge enough problem that they're subjecting people to this instead of announcing ticket sale times or doing a lottery (which are kind of mechanically the same) but hey, other people's time is free.
Also funny: "PAX Prime prices hit a record high as organizers eliminate all-weekend passes" which means they have raised prices while also trying to disguise it.
The system they're using now gives a leg up to obsessive groups of friends who all really want to go together. Switch to something "fair" and next year it'll be all the boring 9-5 people with no friends.
My boss doesn't mind if I'm keeping an eye on a festival website when my code's compiling, and I take 15 minutes to book a ticket when they go on sale. But a call centre worker or a doctor or a teacher or a production line worker isn't in the same position.
If we want to optimize for obsesiveness, a much better solution would be letting people line up at the convention venue and letting only a number of people in while collecting payments at entrance.
First, I doubt scalping is only 1%. But by not announcing, they are inconveniencing 500-1000% of congoers to benefit someone.
This interview is funny because it comes down to “here’s how we do it, we don’t feel like changing and haven’t thought about stuff too deeply because we don’t care because we sell all our tickets anyway”
On the day of you can scan the unique code on your phone (generated that day, and ideally OTP) to pick up your tickets. If you lost that device, go to Gate B for ID verifications.
Now you’ve solved the issue of A) enforcing verification that the ticket buyer is the one attending and B) not having to spend hours checking IDs.
> Scalpers could, over time, flood the submission box, profile creation, or whatever means we’d use to collect entries, and ultimately, you’d have a higher percentage of scalpers purchasing badges than before.
It seems pretty simple to require profiles and then do basic analysis to identify fake profiles. It’s not like they have billions like Twitter, they’d only have like what 50-150k?
I think it’s possible without requiring a link to a social media profile.
"Increase Price. And this is what you’re touching on here. I get this “solution” suggested to me quite a bit, and yes, there is validity to it. If scalpers didn’t see the profits they do, they wouldn’t be incentivized to participate in the first place. But it brings up the pickle we are often in, which is that pesky tradeoff again. Yes, we’d get to line our pockets with money for days, but we like to think of PAX as the show for the every-gamer, and if we didn’t keep badges affordable, it’s not fair to those that can only afford our current price."
You either charge what the thing is worth or you will have people arbitraging your system. That's the world, no getting around it without adding tons of extra costs.
I am constantly surprised how A. Unpopular the idea of charging what people will pay is B. how rarely it is done.
It's unpopular because it alienates the fans that don't have a lot of money.
The main problem is that the events don't really want to solve this problem. Ticketmaster takes a cut of the scalped tickets, scarcity generates insane amounts of buzz. They should just try being honest instead.
If you make the tickets non-transferrable, then it prevents last minute ticket swaps, and will piss off people and cause a PR nightmare. Plus you have to deal with fake IDs, expired IDs, name changes, etc. And many events cater to people who'd rather not have their legal names associated with an event for a wide variety of reasons.
If you want them to be transferrable, then you have to set up an exchange like Burning Man did to manage them, and it requires a ton of staff overhead that takes away from dealing with the event itself. And creates the risk that a database full of your attendees personal information could get hacked.
I can't speak for Ticketmaster, as I have not used it very much, and none of the events I listed use it either.
Also you don't have to tie it to an id, just pick something that is personal and can't change hands easily. Be it phones, old enough accounts (steam for example), emails which have been subscribed long enough. Hell, plant an underskin chip if you're doing a distopian cyberpunk convention.
Also, Robert Khoo left PA the year after this article was published.
I suspect that just mailing the badge beforehand would have worked well instead of requiring pickup.
Frankly, I doubt the premise, though. Conventions are basically advertisement, and I suspect the chaos regarding prices is actually part of the plan all along.
It sounds like an auction would just be a more complicated way of raising prices, since the tickets would still go to those customers who are able to bid the most.
Of course the prices are going to increase. If the supply is the same and the demand increases, the price increases. There is nothing anybody can do about that.
I don't want to be unfair to the guy, he seems to be understanding the problem and it's not an easy decision, but that sentence is a bit of a platitude.
The PAX organisers are "artificially" keeping down the price of tickets by controlling supply and fighting scalpers. If instead the auction allowed potential attendees to pay more for their tickets, then those tickets would end up going to attendees that pay far above the original price - as is already true for scalped tickets.
The percentage of tickets which are scalped is not a direct function of the demand on tickets.
PAX is effectively offloading the additional cost to the excluded audience, by either denying a ticket they would be willing to buy, or by making them pay more than they would have.
If the fraction of the scalped tickets is low, then it means that the fraction of people who are willing to buy a ticket at a price much higher than the going price can't be that large. If tickets were sold at $1, you'd certainly see A LOT more scalping going on, wouldn't you?
This would in turn imply that the global outcome wouldn't be that different. People who really want a ticket get one either way, and people who kinda want a ticket benefit from the more fair allocation system.
Not necessarily - you're discounting the effectiveness of anti-scalping measures. (And moreover, scalpers are always incentivised to scalp as many tickets as possible, because they are then put in the situation of controlling the market price with reduced supply, so that they can jack up prices).
If in fact anti-scalping works effectively, then the market price of the ticket in a fair auction can be completely independent of the original price it was sold at.
If demand is high enough, you can even have people who can only buy tickets because of the fixed price - if even 20% of customers are willing and able to pay far above the retail price for a ticket, they would in an auction snap up all the tickets, because PAX is oversubscribed by 5-to-1.
The advantages of VCG over that would be:
- it's easier to implement. Dutch is admittedly easier to understand, but with VCG your average buyer would only need to fill a box in a form.
- there is provable dominance of truthful bidding
There are also downsides, admittedly:
- it doesn't maximize seller revenues
- it doesn't work if all bidders collude (unlikely in this scenario)
- a dishonest seller could use shill/fake bids to increase the going price
The profit over the targeted ticket price could be returned uniformly to ticket holders. I guess this would be hard to do in practice and may complicate bidding strategies but it would avoid price increases.
I believe to reach your intended goal (i.e. the seller doesn't want to profit from the auction), you would have to redistribute the price increase among all participants. A way to do this would be as follows (needless to say, completely unpractical fantasy land experiment, I'm only doing this for the sake of argument):
- Have people freely register. Let's say you have M tickets, N people registered, the interesting case is when N >> M.
- Assign to each registered participant M/N of a ticket (assume tickets are infinitely divisible), and collect from them M/N * P where P is the intended price of a single ticket.
- Have people trade fractions of tickets.
The seller collects exactly M * P, and under usual assumptions the price of a ticket would converge to its 'true' value.
People who are bidding more will still pay more. The main weirdness introduced by that approach is that low bidders that win a ticket may get more money back than they paid.
I'm not sure how a single bidder making multiple bids under different names would impact the math, but intuitively I'd say under the same assumption as above the system should hold: if I make N bets out of M with N << M, the effect should be small enough that the guarantees still (broadly) apply. I could be wrong here, feel free to correct me if you know better.
I’m not sure why you think this is the case here?
If you create a system that can be gamed by a large portion of the bidders being dishonest, a large portion of the bidders will become dishonest.
That's kind of the whole point of the original article.
Every "solution" thrown out by well-meaning third parties is either exploitable by scalpers, makes the experience significantly worse for legitimate buyers, or just shifts which legitimate buyers are able to make a purchase (i.e. I didn't get to buy a ticket but you did. This solution would let me buy a ticket but wouldn't let you buy one).