51–60 of 363 posts
The obvious fix to bots and scalpers is just to not allow ticket transfers - you give your name when you buy the ticket and show your ID at the door. Why this isn't the current process is left as an exercise to the reader.
I don’t understand at all why prices aren’t raised in these severe demand/supply imbalance situations. Same applies to PS5 etc There wouldn’t be a shortage at all if it were priced appropriately. And scalpers just end up capturing that value anyway
They are. Ticketmaster does dynamic pricing now for big shows. Accurate pricing is basically inaccessible beforehand; there’s no chart like in the past with various sections costing specific $s. For the Taylor Swift show in Seattle they published a range of ticket prices from $49-$199… we paid ~$600 for seats in section 131 that were VIP seats by default (that also added to the price; but the pricing was totally opaq…
Back in the day, The Who was presenting "Tommy". First time they were doing it live again. The "cheap" tickets were $75. This was a smaller venue. $75 was a bit of money to be sure. Back then you waited outside record stores to buy tickets. You'd line up, and sometime before the sale, they'd come out and hand out numbers, say 1 to 100. Then you'd sort by the number. Then they'd come out and say "We're starting the li…
Shopify did 3.1M sales per min last year during peek season https://www.shopify.com/ca/blog/bfcm-data. There's more contention for this use case, but I don't think this is as an intractable problem. I do think an alternate model like the post proposes would greatly help.
The obvious fix to bots and scalpers is just to not allow ticket transfers - you give your name when you buy the ticket and show your ID at the door. Why this isn't the current process is left as an exercise to the reader.
"Papers, please." How could it be done without invading privacy?
Why not have a big closed auction? Everyone has a week or so to submit how much they are willing to pay for a ticket. Once the auction closes, sort by price and take the number of seats available. Everyone pays the minimum price that still fits in the seats available. I'm imagining a large scale Vickery auction, sorry if I'm not explaining super well. Everyone pays the same, but people get a price they think is fair.
The system proposed in this post has the advantage of correctly pricing every seat individually without anyone having to put in multiple bids. The people buying earlier are paying the highest price and get to choose the best seats. Those buying later would pay less but the good seats would already be taken. A Vickery auction would not, I think, lend itself to that kind of price discovery.
People could even bid "conditionally" for multiple sections, and once bidding closes you resolve the separate auctions in order from best to worst. If a person with multiple bids gets a good seat, their bids in the other sections get cancelled.
Seems to me that this could have very similar results as the dutch auction method, but each ticket is more fairly priced. Your ticket costs the same as the next guy, assuming they have a seat in the same section as you.
Edit: also, as mentioned somewhere else here, you're likely to have a threshold where everyone wants to buy once they see available seats start to disappear, causing a kind of "bank runoff" where everyone rushes to buy tickets all at once, putting us back where we started.
The obvious fix to bots and scalpers is just to not allow ticket transfers - you give your name when you buy the ticket and show your ID at the door. Why this isn't the current process is left as an exercise to the reader.
I wasn't able to go to a convention because my girlfriend already bought plane tickets to Las Vegas. If I weren't able to sell the ticket, there would be no way for me to recoup the cost
I don’t understand at all why prices aren’t raised in these severe demand/supply imbalance situations. Same applies to PS5 etc There wouldn’t be a shortage at all if it were priced appropriately. And scalpers just end up capturing that value anyway
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are. Ticketmaster does dynamic pricing now for big shows. Accurate pricing is basically inaccessible beforehand; there’s no chart like in the past with various sections costing specific $s. For the Taylor Swift show in Seattle they published a range of ticket prices from $49-$199… we paid ~$600 for seats in section 131 that were VIP seats by default (that also added to the price; but the pricing was totally opaq…
$600 per ticket?
Make it a lottery. A toy example, instead of selling 10,000 tickets that sell for $1000 sell 500k “lottery” tickets for $20 each. A lucky 10,000 get to the concert. The artist/venue makes the same amount. Everyone gets a chance at seeing the artist for a reasonable price. Would work for very popular artists with young fans like T Swift. Lottery tickets would need to be non-transferable as well.
Also you have to navigate gambling laws in all the different states, provinces, and countries you're selling in.
And you also lose the freedom to bring a different friend if your original date drops out.
The Dutch Auction idea in the article is actually really simple and cuts out the complexity that comes with transfer limits, ID-must-match rules, etc.