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Comment by bun_at_work | Hacker News Reader

How is the price inflation natural? The supply-demand relationship is unnaturally muddled with when someone restricts supply by purchasing all the tickets at once, especially with automated tools average consumers don't have/use. They then just resell the tickets - not at some supply-demand balanced value, but at their determined value, often 200%+ the original price.

Supply is already fixed on things like tickets anyway, due to venue sizes, so this is just further restriction. It's not natural.

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I'm not a particularly big fan of Kid Rock, for a number of reasons. But he and a few artists had started doing things to thwart scalpers.

Namely, he'd announce tours slowly. And basically the strategy was that as scalpers bought out shows, he'd add another show in the same city. And keep doing that until there was no demand, no resale market, so scalpers were forced to sell at face or near face value. "I can keep throwing dates at you, and you're paying for the seats, so it doesn't hurt me, but no-one will buy them from you".

Eventually the scalpers learned to not, or minimally resell his tickets.

I mean, the enabling principle behind scalping is that demand is more than supply but supply does not increase to match. More people want the tickets than there are tickets, scalping means it's based on cost instead of who you know or how much time you're willing to spend or how lucky you get.

This doesn't just solve scalping, this fixes the lack of supply of tickets which allows scalping to exist

edit: I'm not sure I completely stand by this. There are various good reasons to sell tickets for cheaper than the maximum price you could and still sell out. Still, it's a harder problem to solve than it looks

That’s pretty funny actually.

They then just resell the tickets - not at some supply-demand balanced value

It is the supply-demand balanced value. If it wasn't, they wouldn't be able to sell them.

Playing devil's advocate: In a market where value is signalled by scarcity, creating artificial scarcity creates artificial value.

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