>Which, as I said before, is only some of the time, but even under that assumption... The only scenario where it's not is if the demand curve is perfectly inel

>Which, as I said before, is only some of the time, but even under that assumption... The only scenario where it's not is if the demand curve is perfectly inelastic. If the price is set at $100, and selling it for $400 instead doesn't raise the average willingness to pay of buyers, then there has to be exactly the same demand at $100 as at $400, which is extremely unlikely. >Then why don't they? Anyone who buys a ticket intending to go to the play is free to change their mind and resell it. Modern online services make this quite easy. But most people don't resell their tickets. We're talking about a hypothetical scenario without scalpers. In that scenario, it's difficult to impossible to resell tickets. >But here is one possible situation where even an economically rational actor would prefer to have a ticket than to be awarded a market price: Yes, positing an income effect from winning the ticket lottery can produce a model where this result no longer holds. But income effects that strong are insanely rare. To reframe this, you're suggesting if they had found $400 on the street that morning, the rational thing to do given their preferences is to spend $400 on a ticket, but they shouldn't otherwise. You're depicting someone so poor that an additional $400 represents a significant wealth difference, but also where it makes sense to spend $400 on a ticket rather than on other things. In the real world, I think we'd call someone like that irrational. It might be plausible in other contexts, but it doesn't seem reasonable in the ticket context.