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The scalper issue would go away if tickets were auctioned off instead in order to find the actual equilibrium price. I know that this is a solution that some of these only platforms considered. Nothing ever happened. However, now they are marketplaces and the ticket gets sold twice which means the platform gets commission twice. So no scalpers made money on the delta between sticker price and equilibrium and the platform for commission twice. All that is money that the artist and venue aren't seeing. Just do auctions!

Edit: The reservations also weren't free. For several restaurants I've had to figure out at what time new reservation open up, set an alarm and then still sometimes not get a seat because it's already booked out. When I traveled to Spain we had one place we called late at night our time to get a reservation. None of that is free. I'd happily paid extra to avoid this trouble and beer certain that I can go to the restaurants for which I'm traveling to another continent.

> The issue is that you were taking something that was free (open reservation slots), and then forcing people to pay for them if they wanted to dine there... when they could have just made a reservation -- perhaps farther in advance -- for free.

So first come first serve is an okay way of allocating resources, but charging a higher price is not?

Are you just intentionally missing the point here?

Correct.

Why?

It is economically inefficient. Scalpers create no value and destroy some by spending their time.

Scalpers transfer goods from those with lower willingness to pay to those with higher willingness to pay. This is by definition increasing economic efficiency. Rationing of scarce resources and all that.

Transferring goods from those "with lower willingness to pay to those with higher willingness to pay" does not increase economic efficiency, it changes the allocative efficiency. But at scale, in many situations, scalping merely becomes rent seeking. Rent seeking reduces allocative efficiency. How much the rent-seeking of scalpers offsets the allocative efficiency is up for debate.

But all of this is sideways to when and whether scalping is moral or, at least, preferable in society. Not all actions which increase allocative efficiency are things we actually want in society.

Otherwise, kidnapping and ransoming children back to their parents would be a boon industry.

The first paragraph is only true if you believe the supply is fixed (ie the elasticity on the extensive margin is zero). This is often a good way to teach economics because much of the math remains the same in a production environment but when you apply it in an environment it isn’t designed for it leads to fallacies like this one. Free markets and capitalism work precisely because it isn’t a zero sum game like this.

And your last two paragraphs are nonsensical, you are comparing the right to eat at a top end restaurant with the right to not have your kids kidnapped it’s downright laughable that you’d see such a moral equivalence.

It’s hard to take a reply serious from a person who doesn’t understand analogies.

I understand analogies just fine, your analogy is just ridiculous because you analogize kidnapping and ticket scalping.

The rationing already occurs in the reservation process, without money changing hands.

> This is by definition increasing economic efficiency

Bespoke markets are by definition economically inefficient. There's a reason most people buy mass-manufactured cars, and it's not just the cost, it's that bespoke car production cannot make enough cars to meet demand.

At absolute best a bespoke market may sell a few more of a limited set of dining opportunities to others through the additional marketing medium. At better what bespoke markets do is maximize profit taking. At bad this maximization of profit taking channels money to the middleman that otherwise would have gone to the merchant (as there will be people who pay for a reservation and then order the cheapest meal at the restaurant, as they can't afford more). And at worst this makes it inconvenient for people to frequent the restaurant, resulting in an overall reduction of customers. The bad and worst circumstances can result in fewer operating restaurants. And artificial resource scarcity is the opposite of economically efficient.

If scalpers (who have overheads of their own) are making money then that implies the restaurant is doing the economic equivalent of leaving a lot of $100 bills on the floor. Before those bills were being picked up by random customers but now they are being picked up by people who heard there were restaurants leaving $100 bills on the floor. But the cause is ultimately the restaurant choosing to just give up free money by not charging a price so that supply and demand equal and the market clears.

You're assuming my "bad" and "worst" scenarios do not exist. And also assuming that knock-on effects don't occur which cause issues in other parts of the economy. A cartoon-like example: spend X+Y money to dine at restaurant, spend -Y less money elsewhere, people working elsewhere are laid off and can no longer afford to spend money at restaurant. Restaurant loses customers. Restaurant closes.

If that happened then the scalpers would go out of business first as demand at the face value would be falling closer to the supply.

Mutually assured destruction does happen. The problem is if there are more potential scalpers who are convinced they know why the previous scalper failed than there are restaurants that can absorb the hit.

Yes, but the restaurant has set prices they think are appropriate for their food. They want to be open to any customer willing to pay $x per person to eat, more or less. Scalpers make it so that people who can only barely pay $x per person are supplanted by people willing to pay much more. These people have higher ability to pay, but that doesn't mean they will receive as much utility as the people who are being priced out.

The restaurant cares about increasing people's utility, not about only serving a the wealthiest fraction of people who can afford their food (those with the highest ability to pay).

The restaurant is free to require names upon making the reservation and checking IDs.

The market already does that.

In this case I would say yes. It's not a universal thing.

I would imagine the immediate problem is just that both approaches are fine, but the approach that is not fine is a third party arbing the interchange, i.e. you want either the seller or the buyer to get the surplus, not a rando in between.

Fair to say "exploiting the commons for personal gain"?

> (which she tried to hide with several all-too-transparent euphemisms

"market maker" ?

Call it what it is -- rent-seeking (or maybe in HN parlance, "MitM attack"). Every single economist from Smith to Marx hates these people.

Arbitraging prices in different markets is not rent seeking.

Forcibly divesting consumer from producer, creating two separate markets where before there was only one, is rent-seeking. They artificially created the conditions that justify their existence, and if they were to stop existing or otherwise stop their practice, the situation would revert. None of this behavior is defensible following any economic ideology except a trivially cruel one.

There is no force, the seller can require name at time of purchase and check identification.

Which requires more effort on their side. The seller have to spend d money to defend its business from rent seeker.

The amount of effort of typing in a name and checking an ID which everyone has on them is inconsequential relative to the benefit.

You will have to convince the people who actually run these platforms that that is true if you want it to be a feature of reality. It seems only you are here speaking in hypothesis while everyone else is speaking about facts of the matter.

What are the different markets? These people just buy up the supply early and resell to the same market.

The markets are at different times and places. Sometimes it is physical (such as on the sidewalk outside the venue). Or it could be a different website.

Curious to hear what these euphemisms were

Bringing efficiency to a sub-utilized market, perhaps.

> These people are the worst of capitalism.

That's pretty strong. I won't name all the people doing much worse, but lots of people do jobs that are only about profit, such as much of the finance industry, tech industry, etc. If she was a developer for Google's ad system, would you do the same?