4 ms·
I can't remember the post, but I remember a while back there was a guy on here who said he used to work as a scalper. I remember he said that despite talking a
by vivekd 9y ago
I can't remember the post, but I remember a while back there was a guy on here who said he used to work as a scalper. I remember he said that despite talking about attempts to get rid of scalpers, the reality is that ticket master and other outlets loved scalpers and worked with them. This is because it's in the interest of the ticket vendor to work with scalpers, because scalpers assume the risk of non-selling tickets.
If it weren't' for scalpers, the vendor would take a loss on any tickets that did not sell. Because scalpers exist, they ensure that the tickets get sold out and then the scalper takes the risk of not being able to sell the tickets.
Ticketmaster and other vendors will never get rid of scalpers because they have a very strong financial incentive not to.
- 5555624 9y agoThis on? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13643045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13643045
- vivekd 9y agoYes, that's amazing that you were able to find it.
- hardtke 9y agoThe research mentioned from 2007 fascinating. Ticketmaster auctioned off a limited number of prime seats. The authors showed that the auction price for these seats was equal to the secondary market "scalper" price for these seats. It's possible to have a hybrid where only the prime seats go to auction. Ticketmaster does this sometimes already by directly listing some seats on StubHub.
- pc2g4d 9y agoIt seems weird, though, that an operation like ticketmaster wouldn't work to get rid of this middleman over time, by assuming themselves the risk they had been paying (indirectly) scalpers to assume. Maybe it's that artists also like to appear virtuous by keeping nominal prices low, even if in practice everyone attending the concert pays substantially more.