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Comment by sgron | Hacker News Reader

Ticketmaster actually experimented with this https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mic.20180230

Our basic findings suggest that the auctions “worked”: price discovery substantially improved; artist revenues roughly doubled versus the fixed-price counterfactual; and, perhaps most importantly, the auctions eliminated or at least substantially reduced potential resale profits for speculators.... And yet, over the decade that has passed since the time of the data, rather than coming into more widespread use, primary-market auctions for event tickets instead disappeared.... We conclude by speculating as to why the auctions failed to take off. As discussed in the introduction....

They don't seem to mention the most obvious reason: the same companies profit from both the primary and secondary market. Why would TicketMaster want to reduce the number of resales when it collects fees on them?

> They don't seem to mention the most obvious reason: the same companies profit from both the primary and secondary market.

That's not true. Ticketmaster has a monopoly (or near-monopoly) on the primary market. On the secondary market they have a fraction of the market; the dominant players are StubHub, SeatGeek, and Vivid. Furthermore, most of the revenue from primary ticket sales goes to the venue and the artist/promoter, and they are usually completely disintermediated from the resale market.

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