7 ms·

I disagree. Why is it bad to let the free market determine the price for an item with limited supply? With scalping, I know that I can get a ticket at at least

I disagree. Why is it bad to let the free market determine the price for an item with limited supply? With scalping, I know that I can get a ticket at at least some price. If I want to go to an event bad enough, I can pay more and get a ticket. Without scalping, it doesn’t matter how badly I want to go to an event, if I am not lucky enough or fast enough, or able to wait in line, I can’t get a ticket. Scalping does provide a value… it creates liquidity in the market.

ChildOfChaos 4y ago
But one of the reasons why you can't get a ticket in the first place, is because scalpers are buying tickets for the simple reason of reselling the ticket for a higher price. Scalpers increase market demand just as much as people that actually want to go and the only person profiting here is the scalper, who is not really deserving to do so here. If you are going to increase price with demand, at least let it go to the people behind the event/artist in a fair way.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  > But one of the reasons why you can't get a ticket in the first place, is because scalpers are buying tickets for the simple reason of reselling the ticket for a higher price. But the only reason that scalping is profitable is that more people want to go to these events at the original ticket price than there are seats available. > If you are going to increase price with demand, at least let it go to the people behind the event/artist in a fair way. I agree with this. When a show sells out in 5 minutes, the organizers should take note and charge more the next show.
  - ChildOfChaos 4y ago
    > But the only reason that scalping is profitable is that more people want to go to these events at the original ticket price than there are seats available. In general yes, however I have seen plenty of events that didn't sell out and scalpers where left still selling tickets and perhaps some people only knew about sites like ViaGoGo so bought of there. I'm sure times when demand closely matches supply, it's still going to the scalpers because they get in there first.
- djbebs 4y ago
  No it is not.
  - bheadmaster 4y ago
    Yes it is. --- See how pointless this type of comment is? What exact information are you trying to convey here? "I disagree"? Do you consider that your disagreement alone is supposed to be a valid argument?
- cortesoft 4y ago
  This doesn’t make any sense, and isn’t how a market works. Reducing supply to increase demand only works if you are the manufacturer of the item… if you have to buy up the entire market and hold them out to raise prices, it isn’t going to work because you are going to be stuck with inventory you paid too much for. I do agree with you that the solution should be to have the artist make the money… they should raise ticket prices or us an auction system to match the price to the demand.
  - picsao 4y ago
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- drewg123 4y ago
  Scalpers are reselling tickets for profit because the artists price them too low, hence allowing the scalper to make money. Artists price tickets too low for a variety of reasons (the ego boost of playing to sold out venues, a misguided sense of loyalty to their fans, etc). All that is needed to stop scalping is to price the tickets appropriately when they are first issued.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    - sigstoat 4y ago
      the internet is full of folks lamenting how little musicians make for their music. somebody suggests that they ought to be paid more and you subject them to rudeness?
      - Dylan16807 4y ago
        I quoted a single phrase to disagree with, not the entire post. If musicians want more money, great, get that bread. If a musician thinks they have plenty, and wants to let fans in for cheaper, it's horrible to call that objectively wrong and a misguided sense of loyalty. And we're talking about sold out venues going for very high prices; if those particular musicians say a certain price is high enough I will believe them.
    - bheadmaster 4y ago
      I disagree with the choice of language you're using, but I agree with the sentiment. Why the hell would a sense of loyalty to fans be called "misguided"? What does that even imply - that musicians should not be loyal to their fans? That seems like quite a businessman's perspective, looking at music as just show-business with the purpose of making money, instead of an art form. Some things are more important than money. Money is just a middleman. A lot of people seem to forget that.
      - 4y ago
- googlryas 4y ago
  How do scalpers increase demand? The supply is fixed and scalpers don't cause more people to want to go to concerts. If anything that cause fewer people to want to go to concerts?
  - m000 4y ago
    They don't increase demand. They only increase prices because they buy in a matter of minutes ALL of the supply. Then the only way to get a ticket is through the scalpers. And OFC, they will charge you way ABOVE what would be the free market price of the ticket, i.e. the amount you would have to offer to find an individual willing to sell you their ticket, if the direct sales ended up to fans instead of the scalpers.
    - orangecat 4y ago
      And OFC, they will charge you way ABOVE what would be the free market price of the ticket They charge exactly the free market price of the ticket, which does not necessarily have any relationship to the face price. i.e. the amount you would have to offer to find an individual willing to sell you their ticket, if the direct sales ended up to fans instead of the scalpers. This doesn't make sense. If you had a magical way of allocating tickets to the people who genuinely most wanted to attend, the price you'd pay to get one of those people to sell you their ticket would be even higher.
    - googlryas 4y ago
      How exactly do they charge more than the free market price of the ticket? No one would buy their tickets if they charged an amount that was more than anyone was willing to pay. And scalpers are very incentivized to not sit on unsold tickets, since they are pure loss.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
yojo 4y ago
It is likely scalping reduces the total effective supply. Presumably, scalpers do not successfully unload 100% of tickets before the event, any unsold go unused. It is possible (and would depend on demand elasticity and proportion of tickets scalped) that scalpers might have an incentive to intentionally remove tickets in the same way a monopolist has incentive to artificially restrict supply. If prices on the remaining tickets increase more than the price of the unsold ticket, they’re money ahead. This probably isn’t happening, but could in theory.
Dylan16807 4y ago
If they made money in proportion to how much liquidity they provide, that would be much less of a problem. But often tickets are sold below the market price, and scalpers insert themselves and suck up the difference while providing next to no value in exchange.
bheadmaster 4y ago
I disagree with the notion that things should be as expensive as (some) people are willing to pay. The argument seems skewed towards the interests of wealthy. What if all food was priced "optimally" in terms of foodmakers' profit, making it so expensive that half of society starves to death? Would that be just "liquidity in the market"? If so, then honestly fuck the liquidity in the market. The market is supposed to serve the people, not the other way around.
- ravenstine 4y ago
  I disagree! Why should tickets to a Rammstein concert sell for any price but what people are willing to pay for? This isn't exactly food or healthcare we're talking about.
  - bheadmaster 4y ago
    Because, apparently, Rammstein doesn't like the concept of only the wealthiest being able to afford their tickets.
    - ravenstine 4y ago
      Sure, but I was commenting on your argument in particular, not Rammstein, which is a more general philosophical argument than them not wanting their fans in particular to get outpriced.
      - bheadmaster 4y ago
        I was using food as a hyperbole, the same argument can be applied to anything. Should X be priced in such a way to extract the most money possible from a certain top of the wealthiest, leaving effectively everyone else without it? Substitute X for whatever you want, and any affirmative response would be equivalent to saying "nobody should have X except the rich". If you agree with that sentence, then that's no other argument I can bring to the table.
        4y ago
m000 4y ago
> Why is it bad to let the free market determine the price for an item with limited supply? How exactly is scalping "free market"? It is a textbook definition of artificial scarcity. Also, "market liquidity" is just fine, without the help of the scalpers. If you want that bad to go to a concert, just post how much you're willing to pay for a ticket on a couple of FB groups. If you're willing to give 2x - 4x the face value, I'm pretty sure someone will be willing to part with their ticket.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  > How exactly is scalping "free market"? It is a textbook definition of artificial scarcity. No, artificial scarcity is for things that there could be an unlimited amount of, but that the seller artificially restricts the supply of. The limit on the number of seats at a concert is real, and scalpers don't change it. > If you want that bad to go to a concert, just post how much you're willing to pay for a ticket on a couple of FB groups. If you're willing to give 2x - 4x the face value, I'm pretty sure someone will be willing to part with their ticket. What's the difference between the person who would sell me a ticket in your example and the scalpers we have today?
  - bheadmaster 4y ago
    > artificial scarcity is for things that there could be an unlimited amount of, but that the seller artificially restricts the supply of Since the "unlimited amount of" anything doesn't exist in the real world, replace the "unlimited" with "sufficient", and the concept of artificial scarcity can be applied to scalping again. If scalpers sell tickets at 4x the face value, they don't need to sell them all to make a profit - they only need to sell more than 25%. All the others can go to waste, and scalpers are still profiting. That's, again, textbook artificial scarcity.
  - m000 4y ago
    > No, artificial scarcity is for things that there could be an unlimited amount of. There's no such thing as "unlimited amount" of anything that involves the physical world. > What's the difference between the person who would sell me a ticket in your example and the scalpers we have today? Everyone involved would be better-off. Except for the scalpers. Simple as that.
throw_m239339 4y ago
> I disagree. Why is it bad to let the free market determine the price for an item with limited supply? This isn't the free market at first place, it's artificially limiting supply and price gouging as Viagogo provides strictly no added value upon the official ticket retailer. None.
- orangecat 4y ago
  Viagogo provides strictly no added value upon the official ticket retailer. None. It allows people who are willing to pay more to attend, when they otherwise wouldn't have been able to. That's an added value. You can argue that that's outweighed by the loss to people who really wanted to go and who can't afford the market-clearing price, but it's false that zero people benefit.
  - bheadmaster 4y ago
    The added value is that it keeps the less wealthy people out?
mjthrowaway1 4y ago
I think the problem for the artist is that the demand for tickets far exceeds supply. Imagine if the only way to see Bad Bunny is to pay $5000/ticket. I’m fairly confident large artists could sell out at these prices. The problem is you exclude/alienate your fan base so it’s net negative for the artist’s reach. Ticket prices are kept artificially low to be accessible to broader audiences.
- mrob 4y ago
  But the below-market-price tickets are allocated essentially at random, so this is an unreliable way of doing it. If they want to reward loyal fans it would be better to give cheap/free tickets to active followers on social networks, or to give discounts for repeat purchases.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nicoburns 4y ago
> If I want to go to an event bad enough, I can pay more and get a ticket. You might be able to, but lots of people can't afford to do that. You seem to be assuming that the people who want to go the most will pay the most, thus leading to meritocratic distribution of tickets. In reality, it will just skew concert attendance towards the wealthy who can afford to pay even if they're not that fussed about going.
- qeternity 4y ago
  Don’t shoot the messenger but this is the point. In the absence of a better metric, price is the least worst proxy for “who wants to go the most”. The reality is you have a limited supply good that needs allocating. There are a number of systems by which this can occur, but price is the one which has worked best throughout human history. Also it’s been established the artists are often hiding behind scalpers to sell tickets at true market prices, whilst appearing to sell them at “fair” prices.
- unpopular42 4y ago
  Now, why is that a bad thing? Not everyone can live in the best location, not everyone can drive the best car, not everyone can attend the best concert. There is no other way when many people want something that is in limited supply - someone will be left out. Wealth is a proxy for the amount of services provided to others earlier, so why giving tickets in exchange for that is less fair than giving tickets to the one who clicked first?
  - cool_dude85 4y ago
    >Wealth is a proxy for the amount of services provided to others earlier Yeah right. How many services has Elon Musk's toddler given to others, and how much have you?
    - unpopular42 4y ago
      He hasn't. His father has -- obviously.
manholio 4y ago
> Scalping does provide a value… it creates liquidity in the market. That's invalid economic reasoning. Tickets are a monopoly market with a fixed supply. The monopolist (band/label) can issue tickets at whatever price they want, but once that price and quantity is set, additional resellers are only rent extracting, they are gouging consumer surplus and providing zero service in return - the exact same number of tickets are sold to the exact same show. There are many legitimare reasons for a band to issue tickets bellow market clearing prices, i.e. leave some fans with money in their pockets even if they would be willing to pay more. For example, building a long term relation with their fan base, providing a good service for a "fair" price etc. Essentially it's a gift economy where people exchange more values than just money (trust, appreciation, artistic expression etc.); the scalper is throwing sand in that transaction by maximizing its own financial revenue.
- nradov 4y ago
  That's not a real monopoly. There are thousands of good bands. Can't get a ticket to the Rammstein show? Go to a different one.
  - manholio 4y ago
    Can't get natural gas from your distributor? Burn wood or put on a blanket. Yes, economic substitutes exist for almost all human needs except perhaps air and water, not really pertinent to this debate.
Forgeties79 4y ago
“I can afford scalper prices so I don’t see what the big deal is.”
geraneum 4y ago
> price for an item with limited supply It's literally the scalper who's acquired a near monopoly on the supply and is setting the price, not the "free market". Not every dog-eat-dog situation pertains to free market.
tzs 4y ago
What about shows where the number of people who want to buy tickets is about the same as the number of tickets that are available? Without scalping, the band sells tickets for $X and nearly everyone who wants to go is able to buy a ticket for $X. With scalping, the band sells tickets for $X, the scalpers buy a large fraction of them or even all of them for $X each, and then sells them for much more than $X each. This doesn't let people go who otherwise would not have been able to. It just makes them all pay more to do so.
- shonenknifefan1 4y ago
  If demand is comparable to supply at the price at which the tickets were initially purchased by scalpers, then the fair market value on the secondary market would be about the same as the initial price, at which point the scalpers would have lost money on the deal (after accounting for secondary market fees), and customers would end up paying about the same price as they would have if they had purchased them directly from the venue/promoter.
BoorishBears 4y ago
> Without scalping, it doesn’t matter how badly I want to go to an event, if I am not lucky enough or fast enough, or able to wait in line, I can’t get a ticket. Except it does matter how badly you want to go... if you really want to go but you don't want to wait in line, and someone else also badly wants to go, and they do want to wait... they want it more. They deserve it. So really you're against a meritocracy based on how badly someone wants to go to the concert, and instead want to define merit based on discretionary income. It takes some self-awareness but people really need to take themselves out of their bubbles before they speak. I can't imagine people who don't live in the HN bubble saying things like "if I really want to go I can just pay more, duh" it's a bad look that's the root if why people look down on "techies" as being aloof and socially backwards.
- Forgeties79 4y ago
  Very well said. It just comes off as callous. I imagine if they were, say, bidding on a house or buying a car and got a scalper-like treatment, they would singing a very different tune. I often find people who seem to lack empathy really lack imagination and think, “it can’t happen to me.”
consp 4y ago
> Why is it bad to let the free market determine the price for an item with limited supply. Because the limited supply usually isn't there and artificially created for the sole purpose of rising prices. For tickets you can see this happening when there are suddenly lots of tickets available all over the radio and tv shows a week or so before the event (since they have to fill up all the unsold places).
quantum_magpie 4y ago
Because the market isn't free. It is controlled by those with most money, political prowess, and fastest bots. And in this imaginary 'free market', the ones with most money buy the political power and the fastest bots.
quantum_magpie 4y ago
Because if you would pay 200$ for the concert, 50$ would go to the band, the actual value creators at the concert. If you then pay 900$ to the scalpers, 50$ goes to the band, the value creators, and 700$ to the cunts, the exploiters. They created absolutely zero, but they sucked the majority of the money. They destroy value.

ChildOfChaos 4y ago

But one of the reasons why you can't get a ticket in the first place, is because scalpers are buying tickets for the simple reason of reselling the ticket for a higher price. Scalpers increase market demand just as much as people that actually want to go and the only person profiting here is the scalper, who is not really deserving to do so here. If you are going to increase price with demand, at least let it go to the people behind the event/artist in a fair way.

josephcsible 4y ago
> But one of the reasons why you can't get a ticket in the first place, is because scalpers are buying tickets for the simple reason of reselling the ticket for a higher price. But the only reason that scalping is profitable is that more people want to go to these events at the original ticket price than there are seats available. > If you are going to increase price with demand, at least let it go to the people behind the event/artist in a fair way. I agree with this. When a show sells out in 5 minutes, the organizers should take note and charge more the next show.
- ChildOfChaos 4y ago
  > But the only reason that scalping is profitable is that more people want to go to these events at the original ticket price than there are seats available. In general yes, however I have seen plenty of events that didn't sell out and scalpers where left still selling tickets and perhaps some people only knew about sites like ViaGoGo so bought of there. I'm sure times when demand closely matches supply, it's still going to the scalpers because they get in there first.
djbebs 4y ago
No it is not.
- bheadmaster 4y ago
  Yes it is. --- See how pointless this type of comment is? What exact information are you trying to convey here? "I disagree"? Do you consider that your disagreement alone is supposed to be a valid argument?
cortesoft 4y ago
This doesn’t make any sense, and isn’t how a market works. Reducing supply to increase demand only works if you are the manufacturer of the item… if you have to buy up the entire market and hold them out to raise prices, it isn’t going to work because you are going to be stuck with inventory you paid too much for. I do agree with you that the solution should be to have the artist make the money… they should raise ticket prices or us an auction system to match the price to the demand.
- picsao 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
drewg123 4y ago
Scalpers are reselling tickets for profit because the artists price them too low, hence allowing the scalper to make money. Artists price tickets too low for a variety of reasons (the ego boost of playing to sold out venues, a misguided sense of loyalty to their fans, etc). All that is needed to stop scalping is to price the tickets appropriately when they are first issued.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  - sigstoat 4y ago
    the internet is full of folks lamenting how little musicians make for their music. somebody suggests that they ought to be paid more and you subject them to rudeness?
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      I quoted a single phrase to disagree with, not the entire post. If musicians want more money, great, get that bread. If a musician thinks they have plenty, and wants to let fans in for cheaper, it's horrible to call that objectively wrong and a misguided sense of loyalty. And we're talking about sold out venues going for very high prices; if those particular musicians say a certain price is high enough I will believe them.
  - bheadmaster 4y ago
    I disagree with the choice of language you're using, but I agree with the sentiment. Why the hell would a sense of loyalty to fans be called "misguided"? What does that even imply - that musicians should not be loyal to their fans? That seems like quite a businessman's perspective, looking at music as just show-business with the purpose of making money, instead of an art form. Some things are more important than money. Money is just a middleman. A lot of people seem to forget that.
    - 4y ago
googlryas 4y ago
How do scalpers increase demand? The supply is fixed and scalpers don't cause more people to want to go to concerts. If anything that cause fewer people to want to go to concerts?
- m000 4y ago
  They don't increase demand. They only increase prices because they buy in a matter of minutes ALL of the supply. Then the only way to get a ticket is through the scalpers. And OFC, they will charge you way ABOVE what would be the free market price of the ticket, i.e. the amount you would have to offer to find an individual willing to sell you their ticket, if the direct sales ended up to fans instead of the scalpers.
  - orangecat 4y ago
    And OFC, they will charge you way ABOVE what would be the free market price of the ticket They charge exactly the free market price of the ticket, which does not necessarily have any relationship to the face price. i.e. the amount you would have to offer to find an individual willing to sell you their ticket, if the direct sales ended up to fans instead of the scalpers. This doesn't make sense. If you had a magical way of allocating tickets to the people who genuinely most wanted to attend, the price you'd pay to get one of those people to sell you their ticket would be even higher.
  - googlryas 4y ago
    How exactly do they charge more than the free market price of the ticket? No one would buy their tickets if they charged an amount that was more than anyone was willing to pay. And scalpers are very incentivized to not sit on unsold tickets, since they are pure loss.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

yojo 4y ago

It is likely scalping reduces the total effective supply. Presumably, scalpers do not successfully unload 100% of tickets before the event, any unsold go unused. It is possible (and would depend on demand elasticity and proportion of tickets scalped) that scalpers might have an incentive to intentionally remove tickets in the same way a monopolist has incentive to artificially restrict supply. If prices on the remaining tickets increase more than the price of the unsold ticket, they’re money ahead. This probably isn’t happening, but could in theory.

Dylan16807 4y ago

If they made money in proportion to how much liquidity they provide, that would be much less of a problem. But often tickets are sold below the market price, and scalpers insert themselves and suck up the difference while providing next to no value in exchange.

bheadmaster 4y ago

I disagree with the notion that things should be as expensive as (some) people are willing to pay. The argument seems skewed towards the interests of wealthy. What if all food was priced "optimally" in terms of foodmakers' profit, making it so expensive that half of society starves to death? Would that be just "liquidity in the market"? If so, then honestly fuck the liquidity in the market. The market is supposed to serve the people, not the other way around.

ravenstine 4y ago
I disagree! Why should tickets to a Rammstein concert sell for any price but what people are willing to pay for? This isn't exactly food or healthcare we're talking about.
- bheadmaster 4y ago
  Because, apparently, Rammstein doesn't like the concept of only the wealthiest being able to afford their tickets.
  - ravenstine 4y ago
    Sure, but I was commenting on your argument in particular, not Rammstein, which is a more general philosophical argument than them not wanting their fans in particular to get outpriced.
    - bheadmaster 4y ago
      I was using food as a hyperbole, the same argument can be applied to anything. Should X be priced in such a way to extract the most money possible from a certain top of the wealthiest, leaving effectively everyone else without it? Substitute X for whatever you want, and any affirmative response would be equivalent to saying "nobody should have X except the rich". If you agree with that sentence, then that's no other argument I can bring to the table.
      - 4y ago

m000 4y ago

> Why is it bad to let the free market determine the price for an item with limited supply? How exactly is scalping "free market"? It is a textbook definition of artificial scarcity. Also, "market liquidity" is just fine, without the help of the scalpers. If you want that bad to go to a concert, just post how much you're willing to pay for a ticket on a couple of FB groups. If you're willing to give 2x - 4x the face value, I'm pretty sure someone will be willing to part with their ticket.

josephcsible 4y ago
> How exactly is scalping "free market"? It is a textbook definition of artificial scarcity. No, artificial scarcity is for things that there could be an unlimited amount of, but that the seller artificially restricts the supply of. The limit on the number of seats at a concert is real, and scalpers don't change it. > If you want that bad to go to a concert, just post how much you're willing to pay for a ticket on a couple of FB groups. If you're willing to give 2x - 4x the face value, I'm pretty sure someone will be willing to part with their ticket. What's the difference between the person who would sell me a ticket in your example and the scalpers we have today?
- bheadmaster 4y ago
  > artificial scarcity is for things that there could be an unlimited amount of, but that the seller artificially restricts the supply of Since the "unlimited amount of" anything doesn't exist in the real world, replace the "unlimited" with "sufficient", and the concept of artificial scarcity can be applied to scalping again. If scalpers sell tickets at 4x the face value, they don't need to sell them all to make a profit - they only need to sell more than 25%. All the others can go to waste, and scalpers are still profiting. That's, again, textbook artificial scarcity.
- m000 4y ago
  > No, artificial scarcity is for things that there could be an unlimited amount of. There's no such thing as "unlimited amount" of anything that involves the physical world. > What's the difference between the person who would sell me a ticket in your example and the scalpers we have today? Everyone involved would be better-off. Except for the scalpers. Simple as that.

throw_m239339 4y ago

> I disagree. Why is it bad to let the free market determine the price for an item with limited supply? This isn't the free market at first place, it's artificially limiting supply and price gouging as Viagogo provides strictly no added value upon the official ticket retailer. None.

orangecat 4y ago
Viagogo provides strictly no added value upon the official ticket retailer. None. It allows people who are willing to pay more to attend, when they otherwise wouldn't have been able to. That's an added value. You can argue that that's outweighed by the loss to people who really wanted to go and who can't afford the market-clearing price, but it's false that zero people benefit.
- bheadmaster 4y ago
  The added value is that it keeps the less wealthy people out?

mjthrowaway1 4y ago

I think the problem for the artist is that the demand for tickets far exceeds supply. Imagine if the only way to see Bad Bunny is to pay $5000/ticket. I’m fairly confident large artists could sell out at these prices. The problem is you exclude/alienate your fan base so it’s net negative for the artist’s reach. Ticket prices are kept artificially low to be accessible to broader audiences.

mrob 4y ago
But the below-market-price tickets are allocated essentially at random, so this is an unreliable way of doing it. If they want to reward loyal fans it would be better to give cheap/free tickets to active followers on social networks, or to give discounts for repeat purchases.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

nicoburns 4y ago

> If I want to go to an event bad enough, I can pay more and get a ticket. You might be able to, but lots of people can't afford to do that. You seem to be assuming that the people who want to go the most will pay the most, thus leading to meritocratic distribution of tickets. In reality, it will just skew concert attendance towards the wealthy who can afford to pay even if they're not that fussed about going.

qeternity 4y ago
Don’t shoot the messenger but this is the point. In the absence of a better metric, price is the least worst proxy for “who wants to go the most”. The reality is you have a limited supply good that needs allocating. There are a number of systems by which this can occur, but price is the one which has worked best throughout human history. Also it’s been established the artists are often hiding behind scalpers to sell tickets at true market prices, whilst appearing to sell them at “fair” prices.
unpopular42 4y ago
Now, why is that a bad thing? Not everyone can live in the best location, not everyone can drive the best car, not everyone can attend the best concert. There is no other way when many people want something that is in limited supply - someone will be left out. Wealth is a proxy for the amount of services provided to others earlier, so why giving tickets in exchange for that is less fair than giving tickets to the one who clicked first?
- cool_dude85 4y ago
  >Wealth is a proxy for the amount of services provided to others earlier Yeah right. How many services has Elon Musk's toddler given to others, and how much have you?
  - unpopular42 4y ago
    He hasn't. His father has -- obviously.

manholio 4y ago

> Scalping does provide a value… it creates liquidity in the market. That's invalid economic reasoning. Tickets are a monopoly market with a fixed supply. The monopolist (band/label) can issue tickets at whatever price they want, but once that price and quantity is set, additional resellers are only rent extracting, they are gouging consumer surplus and providing zero service in return - the exact same number of tickets are sold to the exact same show. There are many legitimare reasons for a band to issue tickets bellow market clearing prices, i.e. leave some fans with money in their pockets even if they would be willing to pay more. For example, building a long term relation with their fan base, providing a good service for a "fair" price etc. Essentially it's a gift economy where people exchange more values than just money (trust, appreciation, artistic expression etc.); the scalper is throwing sand in that transaction by maximizing its own financial revenue.

nradov 4y ago
That's not a real monopoly. There are thousands of good bands. Can't get a ticket to the Rammstein show? Go to a different one.
- manholio 4y ago
  Can't get natural gas from your distributor? Burn wood or put on a blanket. Yes, economic substitutes exist for almost all human needs except perhaps air and water, not really pertinent to this debate.

Forgeties79 4y ago

“I can afford scalper prices so I don’t see what the big deal is.”

geraneum 4y ago

> price for an item with limited supply It's literally the scalper who's acquired a near monopoly on the supply and is setting the price, not the "free market". Not every dog-eat-dog situation pertains to free market.

tzs 4y ago

What about shows where the number of people who want to buy tickets is about the same as the number of tickets that are available? Without scalping, the band sells tickets for $X and nearly everyone who wants to go is able to buy a ticket for $X. With scalping, the band sells tickets for $X, the scalpers buy a large fraction of them or even all of them for $X each, and then sells them for much more than $X each. This doesn't let people go who otherwise would not have been able to. It just makes them all pay more to do so.

shonenknifefan1 4y ago
If demand is comparable to supply at the price at which the tickets were initially purchased by scalpers, then the fair market value on the secondary market would be about the same as the initial price, at which point the scalpers would have lost money on the deal (after accounting for secondary market fees), and customers would end up paying about the same price as they would have if they had purchased them directly from the venue/promoter.

BoorishBears 4y ago

> Without scalping, it doesn’t matter how badly I want to go to an event, if I am not lucky enough or fast enough, or able to wait in line, I can’t get a ticket. Except it does matter how badly you want to go... if you really want to go but you don't want to wait in line, and someone else also badly wants to go, and they do want to wait... they want it more. They deserve it. So really you're against a meritocracy based on how badly someone wants to go to the concert, and instead want to define merit based on discretionary income. It takes some self-awareness but people really need to take themselves out of their bubbles before they speak. I can't imagine people who don't live in the HN bubble saying things like "if I really want to go I can just pay more, duh" it's a bad look that's the root if why people look down on "techies" as being aloof and socially backwards.

Forgeties79 4y ago
Very well said. It just comes off as callous. I imagine if they were, say, bidding on a house or buying a car and got a scalper-like treatment, they would singing a very different tune. I often find people who seem to lack empathy really lack imagination and think, “it can’t happen to me.”

consp 4y ago

> Why is it bad to let the free market determine the price for an item with limited supply. Because the limited supply usually isn't there and artificially created for the sole purpose of rising prices. For tickets you can see this happening when there are suddenly lots of tickets available all over the radio and tv shows a week or so before the event (since they have to fill up all the unsold places).

quantum_magpie 4y ago

Because the market isn't free. It is controlled by those with most money, political prowess, and fastest bots. And in this imaginary 'free market', the ones with most money buy the political power and the fastest bots.

quantum_magpie 4y ago

Because if you would pay 200$ for the concert, 50$ would go to the band, the actual value creators at the concert. If you then pay 900$ to the scalpers, 50$ goes to the band, the value creators, and 700$ to the cunts, the exploiters. They created absolutely zero, but they sucked the majority of the money. They destroy value.