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Why scalpers can get tickets

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Re: Why scalpers can get tickets

#41

Post by amenhotep »

MSFT_Edging wrote: post #23
nayuki wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would take off the "/s", because I agree with your statement at face value. If there are a limited number of tickets but many thousands of fans who are willing and able to pay, then naturally the price goes up. And whether you like it or not, people are either paying with money, or paying with time (e.g. waiting in line), or paying with frustration (e.g. going through opaque scalping networks). The root cause of th…

> The root cause of the problem isn't scalpers; it's the original concert seller either setting too low a price or too low a quantity. Imagine viewing a pricing scheme that allows more socioeconomic groups access to the arts as the core problem. We're experiencing a great decline and fall as social services are failing, wages stagnating, and common cultural experiences are being squeezed for profit, only enabling the…

Few people think it's good that this is how things work. It would be great if artists could set affordable prices for their concerts and anyone who wanted could come! The contention is simply that that's not how it works, that supply and demand is a law not a guideline we can opt out of if we think it's inconvenient. It would be great if we could all just flap our hands and fly wherever we wanted, but gravity has something to say about that just as economics has something to say about "irrationally" priced tickets. Inventing the aeroplane is a laudable goal but go into it with clear eyes, not wishful thinking, and don't think you can keep gravity at bay by shaming it.

Re: Why scalpers can get tickets

#42

Post by philwelch »

armada651 wrote: post #25
nayuki wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would take off the "/s", because I agree with your statement at face value. If there are a limited number of tickets but many thousands of fans who are willing and able to pay, then naturally the price goes up. And whether you like it or not, people are either paying with money, or paying with time (e.g. waiting in line), or paying with frustration (e.g. going through opaque scalping networks). The root cause of th…

The problem with raising the prices is that people are willing to pay so much for a ticket exactly because they're difficult to get. If the tickets were actually easily obtainable but more expensive then paradoxically people wouldn't be willing to pay as much for the ticket because of a perceived loss of value. And as mentioned in the other reply, many people disagree with the "greed is good" philosophy, hence the /s…

The root cause of scarcity here is the number of seats available. The biggest tours routinely book stadiums and arenas with tens of thousands of seats, and despite the scalping and high prices these venues usually sell out. It’s not like they’re all playing tiny downtown clubs. So how exactly are you going to make tickets easier to get?

Re: Why scalpers can get tickets

#43

Post by chii »

tornato7 wrote: post #38

IMO, Comic Con has done a pretty fine job at eliminating scalpers. They do this in a few ways: - Random selection over an hour at ticket sale time that is unique per device, with some 'are you human' checks along the way to make it more difficult to bot. - Requiring physical delivery of the badge with a maximum number per address, or government issued ID to pick it up in person. - Random ID checks during the con. - T…

> So even if you bought it from a scalper, you would now have the code for next year's presale.

i would imagine a scalper would record the code from the badge as well, before giving it to you. So this means they're going to be able to buy just as well, and may be invalidate the code before you get to use it!

Re: Why scalpers can get tickets

#45

Post by cousin_it »

The reason why artists don't sell all tickets to rich people is because they think poor people deserve nice things too, so they lower the price. But surely all poor people deserve nice things, not only your fans? Why not sell tickets to rich people and then donate the proceeds to help poor people? It seems to me that this way everyone wins: artists take the same monetary hit they would've taken anyway if they lowered the price, but the difference goes to poor people instead of scalpers.

Re: Why scalpers can get tickets

#46

Post by danaris »

kmeisthax wrote: post #16
aschobel wrote: post #7

> Ticketmaster now requires text message phone number verification, but they can bypass this by buying “Mobile Virtual Network Operator” phone numbers in bulk from eBay I’m surprised SMS verification is this ineffective at testing for “human-ness”.

The problem is that we're not testing for human-ness, we're testing for uniqueness. What we want is a button that, when pressed by a particular person, gives them one ticket, and then stops giving them tickets. This requires positive identification of each person buying tickets, which means spending lots of money to prevent people from obtaining multiple identifications. I suspect verifying government IDs would be a…

At least in the US, a government-issued ID

a) is not required to vote in many places (and pushing for that requirement is, in fact, one of the major methods of classist/racist voter suppression), and

b) is required to do various other things, like purchase alcohol, drive, or buy plane tickets.

Due to (b), there is already a thriving black market in fake IDs for various reasons, and of various qualities.

Government-issued ID systems are absolutely attacked, fairly aggressively.

Re: Why scalpers can get tickets

#47

Post by slg »

fps-hero wrote: post #27
capableweb wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Artists generally want to have a diverse crowd in terms of disposable income, they don't want to have a crowd of just the people who can/will pay the most.

Every action directed at making tickets more affordable will have the opposite effect of making scalping more profitable. Im amazed that a reverse auction style approach hasn’t caught on, when you are capacity limited it seems nearly optimal for extracting profit and kills the ticket scalping business model.

>it seems nearly optimal for extracting profit and kills the ticket scalping business model.

Also seems nearly optimal for alienating all but your richest fans. The extra profit you might extract from the concert might not actually put you ahead in the long term when fans stop caring about you because of your profit maximizing business practices.

Re: Why scalpers can get tickets

#48

Post by nayuki »

philwelch wrote: post #42
armada651 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with raising the prices is that people are willing to pay so much for a ticket exactly because they're difficult to get. If the tickets were actually easily obtainable but more expensive then paradoxically people wouldn't be willing to pay as much for the ticket because of a perceived loss of value. And as mentioned in the other reply, many people disagree with the "greed is good" philosophy, hence the /s…

The root cause of scarcity here is the number of seats available. The biggest tours routinely book stadiums and arenas with tens of thousands of seats, and despite the scalping and high prices these venues usually sell out. It’s not like they’re all playing tiny downtown clubs. So how exactly are you going to make tickets easier to get?

Scarcity - exactly. Say that an artist is holding a concert and 20 thousand seats are available. But she has 50 million fans all over the world. How do you allocate these 20 thousand seats - who will get them? You can either satisfy the highest bidders, the first in line, or a random lottery. But you cannot choose to disappoint no one. Economics is all about making hard choices, and you can't simply wish them away.

Re: Why scalpers can get tickets

#49

Post by jaybrendansmith »

I think unique identity is worth something. This is what the government (federal, state, local, doesn't matter) ought to have a role in protecting. If we had laws that said, for example, you must have proof of identity in the country or state or region where the arena is located, would that not solve this? We used to do it in the 90s by using phone area codes, and this worked pretty effectively: the early 90s was a golden age of low concert ticket prices.

Re: Why scalpers can get tickets

#50

Post by nayuki »

xnx wrote: post #3

Based on nothing, I think tickets for high-demand events should be allocated: 1/3 first-come first-serve for in-person sales (you pay with your time), 1/3 random assignment (you have to get lucky), 1/3 auction to highest bidder (pay with your money).

This sounds like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Marathon . It has different entry classes such as lottery, previous participant, or pay a high price.
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