Let's say the market will pay $1000 for a ticket. The show would like to see the tickets be $100, so that people who only have $100 can see it. Tickets go on s

Let's say the market will pay $1000 for a ticket. The show would like to see the tickets be $100, so that people who only have $100 can see it. Tickets go on sale for $100, and 100 are bought by a single scalper for $10000. The scalper now needs to sell only 10 tickets at the market rate to break even. Since he only needs to sell 10, he starts by trying to sell them for $1500, knowing he'll initially have few sales, but that he can lower his price later if he needs to. Now what you have is tickets being sold for $1500, and likely empty seats in the theater. The show is making 1/10 the income it might have made and won't be able to run as long, so even fewer people can see it. The larger the margin between market rate and actual rate, the fewer people who will see it, the shorter the show will run, and the more expensive tickets will be for normal people. The smart move is for the theatre to sell all tickets at a falling price: every day, tickets for the show on day X are cheaper than they were yesterday by an amount determined by how many tickets were sold. All seats will be sold at the market rate and scalpers have little margin to take.