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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

It may lead to optimal profit but immensely hurt the society. Not everything should be optimized for profit.

If you are going after full profit optimization we are leaving huge amount on the table by offering billionaires food at prices that are insignificant for tem. Maybe we should start optimizing for the million dollar burgers then?

If the average Brit is spending %10 of their daily income for a meal, obviously its suboptimal for a person making a million a day to eat anything for less than 100K. In fact, it doesn't even have to have anything to do with percentages, maybe the meal can be optimized up until 999910GBP. Even the rich guy needs to eat, optimize the prices to the point that he has to choose between starvation and 999910GBP burger

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seller agrees to sell ticket at $PRICE.

buyer agrees to buy ticket at $PRICE.

how is society hurt, here?

the government banning this is immediately harmful: it prevents a mutually agreeable trade that would otherwise have increased the utility of both parties.

People can't go to concerts despite being just as hardworking or just as big fans and start shooting CEOs on the streets.

Some systems need to work and be accessible to everyone so we can sustain peaceful and healthy society.

This is not charity, this is to account for externalities and the miscalculations in the free market. Awful lot of people are underpaid and overpaid as they progress through their lives because the markets are actually not that efficient and prices are not formed under perfect information or instantly.

You want your mechanical engineers to be able to afford decent life even if all the market current wants is JavaScript engineers because when the tides shift you may end up needing mechanical engineers to produce physical stuff so you want them around and happy.

Also, the price could actually be too low too when its optimized for short term profits. Re-sell 100GBP tickets for 500GBP, filter for money and leave out the actual fans and maybe lose all the events for the next year. If you are going to do a daytime robbery, better not ever need money again from the people you are robbing.

if they want to go to the concert they should pay the fair market price for a ticket. and in addition, they should refrain from murdering people, because murder is wrong.

the high ticket prices incentivise the creation of new venues and the entrant of new artists into the market. they indicate that the music industry is not supplying concerts in sufficient quantity/quality as the market demands, or perhaps not in the right places or at the right times. prices are a signal; you outlaw them at your peril.

this is a case where the monkey-brain fairness intuition is simply flat out 100% wrong. scalper economics has been studied for decades; it is known that banning these trades exacerbates shortages. lot of ppl in this thread who would not pass introductory microeconomics.

>the high ticket prices incentivise the creation of new venues and the entrant of new artists into the market.

Always amuses me that the wannabe market experts ascribe theory of mind to markets. Personal risk tolerance and ability to execute without starving is what constrains supply of talent, who are not intrinsically born with either the knowledge or capability to begin the market based transaction process.

God (or your market) does not magically whip up concerts in response to spreadsheets. People taking risks do.

Amazing isn’t it, people don’t want to think about the implementation details at all. Things just happen magically, if the market demands more concerts and less coders then programmers start doing concerts!

That sounds true, though. Some of the coders can play an instrument, or if that's not important these days they can sing through a filter and dance in spandex. It can be their day job, to support their coding hobby.

"Can play instrument" is almost never good enough to sell tickets, just like "is good with computers" isn't good enough to be a professional programmer.

So, by diverse ways, the market can reassign suitable people to performing. For instance the programmer can go into sound engineering to replace a sound engineer who is now fulfilling an ambition to be on stage.

no it doesn’t happen like that, those who lose marketable value start doing something much less complex like driving taxi. There are numerous examples of such things. market doesn’t reassign anybody to anything because people don’t change overnight or after some age.

It is one of the primary reasons why many people from the subway times and I’m not having a good time, like rocket scientists becoming taxi drivers

Can't parse your last sentence, but OK: the programmer drives a taxi, a talented taxi driver gets an opportunity to perform music. Maybe I didn't understand your issue and you're really complaining that the surplus programmers will be miserable, not that new music acts won't emerge.

>> the high ticket prices incentivise the creation of new venues and the entrant of new artists into the market.

How does scalping, which transfers money from fans, artists, and the music industry to ticket touts who have nothing to do with music, "incentivise the creation" of anything? Except, I suppose, bot farms and clickfarm sweatshops?

Not sure about your situation, but the only situation I ever experienced out there were scalpers getting ridiculous amounts of tickets beforehand, sometimes via shady contacts and then reselling them for profit.

What about some middle ground - allow sale for and below the purchase price and punish severely any profiteering? The only reason scalpers do it is for money - if the punishment and risk are big enough it solved itself.

Where I live, the biggest festival in whole country (Paleo @Switzerland) explicitly bans resale for some time and nobody real is complaining, its fair and tickets are sold within minutes of becoming available.

The last point - if some psycho is starting to shoot others because they can't go to some fucking concert then the underlying condition needs to be targeted, not sweeping reality in front of them so they never trip on some obstacle in real life. 'Eat the rich' trope is stuff immature frustrated kids tell to peers, nothing more.

Sure, the issue isn't ticket resale but profiteering that damages the scene. An alternative could be the tickets be assigned for the individual like plane tickets but be transferable so if someone is transferring tickets all the time you can block them.

> The only reason scalpers do it is for money

The only reason people work and run businesses is for money. Not doing it for money is called a "hobby", "charity" and "volunteering".

The "only" reason? What happened to "making the world a better place"?

> prices are not formed under perfect information

There is no requirement for perfect information in order for a free market to function. The term for lack of perfect information is "risk" and is factored in to negotiations and the price.

I wonder what would happen in a world where sellers have instant information about how rich the buyer is, and they all raise the offered price accordingly, for every product.

That's already being done at some scale to consumers but the actual monumental shift can happen if it can be done to everybody. People are leaving a lot of money on the table by not gauging the prices for individuals that can pay much much more. If Musk is thirsty and forgot to bring his bottle, it should be possible to sell him a billion dollar bottle of water. Anyone around him can just coordinate and gauge the price to the limit and share the profit. The profits from such a trade will greatly exceed the pay of any PA etc, if the opportunity arises just resign don't give him the water for the optimal deal.

If executed perfectly, I imagine this removes all incentive to make money, since you can't obtain any more stuff with more money. It wouldn't even be nicer water. Trading is cut off from ability to accomplish anything. This kills the economy.

All these theories have been tried one way or another. The only one that works is the free market, because the free market is the only one that relies on people being selfish.

Any system that relies on unselfish behavior fails.

No, this isn't proposal for a system. It's a vision of a disaster, if it works.

It's not a proposal it's a thought experiment demonstrating the problems with relentless profit optimization

That's a little happy fairy tale with extra sparkly fairy dust on top but what all that free markets have given us in practice is misery, despair, war, destruction and environmental catastrophe.

Capitalism is “the astonishing belief that the nastiest motives of the nastiest men somehow or other work for the best results in the best of all possible worlds.”

(Attributed to J. M. Keynes: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes#Attributed)

P.S. It doesn't help of course that "free" markets are never really free because they are very quickly taken over by the "nastiest men" etc. and the last thing those people care about is freedom, particularly that of the markets they make their money from.

See for instance the subject of ticket touts. There is no free market in online ticket reselling because the entire market's cornered by bot farmers who buy tickets in bulk automatically the moment they are made available and leave none for anyone else. "Free" market, my sweet little hiney.

And btw, in the UK the same thing happens with driving test slots:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn09v4d2xe7o

the shortage of driving test slots is entirely the fault of inefficient government bureaucracy. people are rationally responding to the scarcity by using bots.

if the supply of tests were allowed to rise naturally to meet the existing demand, this problem wouldn't exist. we are only in this situation because the government artificially limits the supply.

this is a very common pattern where people get upset at high prices but are completely incurious as to where the shortage really comes from.

Sounds like a two birds, one stone kind of thing. Very efficient, I like it.

> Anyone around him can just coordinate and gauge the price to the limit

That's called a "cartel". Cartels are unstable because they have every reason to undersell the cartel price. OPEC had a lot of problems with its members selling on the sly at lower prices.

> and share the profit

They're not going to share the profit. They're going to pocket it.

The seller would lose the sale, because the buyer would go buy it elsewhere.

But the idea is to tailor prices to what the individual is willing to pay, compensating perfectly for any willingness to do extravagant spending caused by having more money, cancelling out its effects so that the buyer gets the same old goods at a new price. The seller isn't undercut by another seller, because the buyer is willing to pay that much.

It probably falls apart on that last assumption: rich people aren't really willing to pay proportionately more for goods.

why can’t I just pay ticketmaster the face value, why must we allow another middleman to charges me more? because capitalism? na mate

"Face value" is constantly changing. Why must you forbid someone from buying and selling something? If the performer has a problem with it, they can easily enforce ID requirements that require whoever buys the ticket first to be the person that attends.

That would be an auction. Now we have a situation where a third party gets between seller and buyer, purchases large quantities of tickets then sells them for an inflated price to the buyer and both buyer and seller feel ripped off.

That's not an auction. It's just entity A selling to entity B and entity B selling to entity C.

Sorry, I should have quoted what I was calling an auction from the comment:

> a mutually agreeable trade that would otherwise have increased the utility of both parties.

Seller agrees to sell ticket at PRICE. Monopoly intermediate provider sells it at $PRICE+$markup. Monopoly intermediate provider sells it to a reseller, which artificially limits the supply available to buyers at any given moment. Buyers have to go to resellers, who then pay $markup2 back to the monopoly provider to transfer the ticket to the ultimate buyer. This may even repeat several times, resulting in the monopoly provider reaping more in markup fees than the seller receives for the actual product.

Original seller is free to sell it with the stipulation that original buyer is the only person that can use the ticket.

However, entertainers have an image problem that conflicts with the desire to maximize profit. Entertainers are often times in the business of appealing to the broader public. But if they restrict their ticket sales to the highest bidder, then the broader public's appeal is limited.

Having a third party engage in the price discrimination allows the entertainer's image to remain intact, while also collecting higher prices (perhaps not from the ticket sales directly, but the third party willing to pay more for the entertainer if the entertainer allows them to resell tickets).

That argument should be equally valid for US healthcare, prison phone calls, price gouging during natural disasters, housing prices, and college tuition.

Yet many people, possibly most people, feel something is broken.

Free markets optimize for utility. Profit is just a side effect of that.

Whatever it optimizes for, often it makes it everything fall apart due to short sightedness, unaccounted externalities and actual failure in optimization. Would have been all fine eventually if human life wasn't finite and suffering didn't exist.

Nobody has implemented a better system.

IMHO this wanders into the realm of philosophy at this point because of the word “better”. You can always choose alternative KPIs and prioritize.

The KPI of profit has become harmful enough that people like Thiel observe that the system isn’t working anymore.

The US free market is objectively better than any other system. That's why the US has millions of people trying to get in. They're not trying to get into Cuba or Venezuela. The USSR had to build a wall to keep people from fleeing.

Not everyone is trying, it's mostly Mexicans and other south Americans so you can say that it's better than cartel ridden poor countries. Definitely provides great opportunities to do paid work or even invest but that's just one aspect of life.

I think a moderately, responsively regulated market is usually superior to a strictly free market, personally.

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