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Reselling tickets for profit to be outlawed in UK government crackdown
- WalterBright 11mo agoArbitrage is a normal free market process that finds the optimal prices for things. Trying to regulate prices always results in gluts, shortages, and black markets.
- mrtksn 11mo agoIt may lead to optimal profit but immensely hurt the society. Not everything should be optimized for profit. If you are going after full profit optimization we are leaving huge amount on the table by offering billionaires food at prices that are insignificant for tem. Maybe we should start optimizing for the million dollar burgers then? If the average Brit is spending %10 of their daily income for a meal, obviously its suboptimal for a person making a million a day to eat anything for less than 100K. In fact, it doesn't even have to have anything to do with percentages, maybe the meal can be optimized up until 999910GBP. Even the rich guy needs to eat, optimize the prices to the point that he has to choose between starvation and 999910GBP burger
- _dain_ 11mo agoseller agrees to sell ticket at $PRICE. buyer agrees to buy ticket at $PRICE. how is society hurt, here? the government banning this is immediately harmful: it prevents a mutually agreeable trade that would otherwise have increased the utility of both parties.
- mrtksn 11mo agoPeople can't go to concerts despite being just as hardworking or just as big fans and start shooting CEOs on the streets. Some systems need to work and be accessible to everyone so we can sustain peaceful and healthy society. This is not charity, this is to account for externalities and the miscalculations in the free market. Awful lot of people are underpaid and overpaid as they progress through their lives because the markets are actually not that efficient and prices are not formed under perfect information or instantly. You want your mechanical engineers to be able to afford decent life even if all the market current wants is JavaScript engineers because when the tides shift you may end up needing mechanical engineers to produce physical stuff so you want them around and happy. Also, the price could actually be too low too when its optimized for short term profits. Re-sell 100GBP tickets for 500GBP, filter for money and leave out the actual fans and maybe lose all the events for the next year. If you are going to do a daytime robbery, better not ever need money again from the people you are robbing.
- _dain_ 11mo agoif they want to go to the concert they should pay the fair market price for a ticket. and in addition, they should refrain from murdering people, because murder is wrong. the high ticket prices incentivise the creation of new venues and the entrant of new artists into the market. they indicate that the music industry is not supplying concerts in sufficient quantity/quality as the market demands, or perhaps not in the right places or at the right times. prices are a signal; you outlaw them at your peril. this is a case where the monkey-brain fairness intuition is simply flat out 100% wrong. scalper economics has been studied for decades; it is known that banning these trades exacerbates shortages. lot of ppl in this thread who would not pass introductory microeconomics.
- salawat 11mo ago>the high ticket prices incentivise the creation of new venues and the entrant of new artists into the market. Always amuses me that the wannabe market experts ascribe theory of mind to markets. Personal risk tolerance and ability to execute without starving is what constrains supply of talent, who are not intrinsically born with either the knowledge or capability to begin the market based transaction process. God (or your market) does not magically whip up concerts in response to spreadsheets. People taking risks do.
- mrtksn 11mo agoAmazing isn’t it, people don’t want to think about the implementation details at all. Things just happen magically, if the market demands more concerts and less coders then programmers start doing concerts!
- card_zero 11mo agoThat sounds true, though. Some of the coders can play an instrument, or if that's not important these days they can sing through a filter and dance in spandex. It can be their day job, to support their coding hobby.
- tombot 11mo agowhy can’t I just pay ticketmaster the face value, why must we allow another middleman to charges me more? because capitalism? na mate
- lotsofpulp 11mo ago"Face value" is constantly changing. Why must you forbid someone from buying and selling something? If the performer has a problem with it, they can easily enforce ID requirements that require whoever buys the ticket first to be the person that attends.
- helsinkiandrew 11mo agoThat would be an auction. Now we have a situation where a third party gets between seller and buyer, purchases large quantities of tickets then sells them for an inflated price to the buyer and both buyer and seller feel ripped off.
- lotsofpulp 11mo agoThat's not an auction. It's just entity A selling to entity B and entity B selling to entity C.
- helsinkiandrew 11mo agoSorry, I should have quoted what I was calling an auction from the comment: > a mutually agreeable trade that would otherwise have increased the utility of both parties.
- matthewdgreen 11mo agoSeller agrees to sell ticket at PRICE. Monopoly intermediate provider sells it at $PRICE+$markup. Monopoly intermediate provider sells it to a reseller, which artificially limits the supply available to buyers at any given moment. Buyers have to go to resellers, who then pay $markup2 back to the monopoly provider to transfer the ticket to the ultimate buyer. This may even repeat several times, resulting in the monopoly provider reaping more in markup fees than the seller receives for the actual product.
- lotsofpulp 11mo agoOriginal seller is free to sell it with the stipulation that original buyer is the only person that can use the ticket. However, entertainers have an image problem that conflicts with the desire to maximize profit. Entertainers are often times in the business of appealing to the broader public. But if they restrict their ticket sales to the highest bidder, then the broader public's appeal is limited. Having a third party engage in the price discrimination allows the entertainer's image to remain intact, while also collecting higher prices (perhaps not from the ticket sales directly, but the third party willing to pay more for the entertainer if the entertainer allows them to resell tickets).
- sowbug 11mo agoThat argument should be equally valid for US healthcare, prison phone calls, price gouging during natural disasters, housing prices, and college tuition. Yet many people, possibly most people, feel something is broken.
- hertzdonut 11mo ago[dead]
- WalterBright 11mo agoFree markets optimize for utility. Profit is just a side effect of that.
- mrtksn 11mo agoWhatever it optimizes for, often it makes it everything fall apart due to short sightedness, unaccounted externalities and actual failure in optimization. Would have been all fine eventually if human life wasn't finite and suffering didn't exist.
- WalterBright 11mo agoNobody has implemented a better system.
- mrtksn 11mo agoIMHO this wanders into the realm of philosophy at this point because of the word “better”. You can always choose alternative KPIs and prioritize. The KPI of profit has become harmful enough that people like Thiel observe that the system isn’t working anymore.
- WalterBright 11mo agoThe US free market is objectively better than any other system. That's why the US has millions of people trying to get in. They're not trying to get into Cuba or Venezuela. The USSR had to build a wall to keep people from fleeing.
- mrtksn 11mo agoNot everyone is trying, it's mostly Mexicans and other south Americans so you can say that it's better than cartel ridden poor countries. Definitely provides great opportunities to do paid work or even invest but that's just one aspect of life.
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- criddell 11mo agoAre you assuming the goal is to find the optimal price?
- matthewdgreen 11mo agoHave you considered the possibility that this dogma is not accurate, and that in the US we actually have a market failure?
- WalterBright 11mo agoWhat market failure are you seeing here?
- usr1106 11mo agoCreating artificial shortage and than charging overprices is not a normal free market process. Businesses should create added value, then they can charge a price for it. Actors that misuse or unfairly dominate free markets will trigger regulation, that's the way it has always been. Some regulators are weak, so we still have endure cancers like Google and Microsoft.
- lotsofpulp 11mo agoThere is no artificial shortage, there is an inherent shortage. Sufficiently popular entertainers such that a ticket price arbitrage opportunity exists must be, by definition, in short supply. There exist only so many performance days in an entertainer’s lifetime. And, obviously, venues have capacity limits.
- usr1106 11mo agoSo what is the added value created by those resellers to address the inherent shortage?
- haneefmubarak 11mo agoIn theory they provide market liquidity such that for anyone who REALLY wants to go, at any time prior to and potentially even during the event, there remain some options available for purchase; as opposed to basically spinning the lottery on whether you get to go or not, especially for oversubscribed events.
- hypeatei 11mo agoHmm, it seems like we've forgotten that we can vote with our wallet. If this practice wasn't desired because it raised prices too much or some other reason, then people wouldn't give the resellers their money.
- RHSeeger 11mo agoThis assumes the only dynamics are "the seller wants to make as much as possible" and "the buyer wants to spend as little as possible". There are plenty of cases where the seller (artist, venue, etc) want to keep prices low to allow a wider audience to attend the show.
- littlestymaar 11mo ago> Trying to regulate prices always results in gluts, shortages When the demand is higher than the supply and supply is inelastic (which is the case for these kind of events) then there's no difference between unaffordable prices and a shortage. The difference only exist for the upper class who can pay the inflated price anyway. In a society where there are significant differences in income, the price signal is meaningless and it just segregates people by revenues.
- WalterBright 11mo agoIf the price signal is meaningless, then why aren't the scalpers charging 100 times as much?
- littlestymaar 11mo agoDo you know what the “price signal” phrase even mean? Because this answer has absolutely nothing to do with price signal as a economic concept.
- _dain_ 11mo agoidiotic populist move. resellers exist because the listed price is much lower than the price people are willing to pay. banning them doesn't make the demand go away. this will just create a black market in resold tickets, with no legal recourse against fraud etc. yookay government's crusade to outlaw all useful economic activity continues apace. you can't legislate away scarcity. EDIT: >How is scalping a useful economic activity? What new value is created by for example buying up loads of Taylor Swift concert tickets and selling them at a marked up price? if I don't want to wait in a queue or spam F5 on a website at 4 in the morning so I can be one of the first, I can instead pay somebody to do all that tedious work for me, and they can profit from it. this is a valuable service that I'm willing to pay for, and have in fact paid for with no regrets whatsoever. SCARCITY IS A FUNDAMENTAL ECONOMIC FACT. more people want to attend a concert than there are seats available. this scarcity must be rationed in some way. there are many ways: queues, lotteries, clientelism, theft. prices are one of the more efficient mechanisms, because unlike the others, money can be directly traded, stored, accounted for, and is a means by which the value of other goods and services can be compared. if I wait in a queue, that is a cost I have to pay, but it is simply lost. it goes nowhere. but if I pay someone else to sit in the queue for me, I can do something else useful with the time I would have spent in the queue, and that other person can then use the money to buy something else in the future. that is the value of scalping! moreover, that one other person can sit in the queue on behalf of N other people; we all benefit from this economic specialisation and reduction of redundancy. scalpers are the unjustly persecuted heroes of our economy. they are apostates from Queueing, our national religion.
- yladiz 11mo agoIt’s not like you really had much recourse before anyway, if someone sold you a fake ticket or one that’s already been used, are you really going to sue them or the platform? Charge back and hope you get the money back?
- _dain_ 11mo ago>Charge back and hope you get the money back? yes, that's what Section 75 protection is for
- cyrusradfar 11mo agoI think this is net-positive for venues, local economies, and the artists. All this money is effectively getting sucked out of local economies and moving to multi-national marketplaces. We also know prices can go up on the raw ticket and we know that consumers can bear that given where they were before this legislation. That additional money will go to Venues, Artists and Labels who will, ideally, create more and better shows for the all of us. If you imagine today that a ticket is $45 (speaking US) and customers pay $450, eventually for it. That $405 doesn't go to the Artist or the Venue, it goes to a middle layer which adds little to no value for the eco-system beyond supporting a transaction. Moreover, when you spend all the budget on the ticket, you're less likely to buy merch and food at the venue. Something most on this site could easily build with the help of stripe, a few database tables, and an API to the venue's ticketing management system.
- hypeatei 11mo agoIf Venues and Artists were missing out, couldn't they have changed their terms when selling the ticket? I don't really see why the UK government would need to step in here at all.
- cyrusradfar 11mo agoI'd generally agree with your direction & perspective and don't know why this was the necessary place. - Why didn't venues want more of the revenue? - Why couldn't artists simply set their terms for their tickets? I don't have the answers and it may depend on There are hands at play I'm not seeing/understanding as this legislation was pushed for by major artists.
- maldev 11mo agoMost venues ban resale, or limit it heavily. What you end up with is sketchy people outside the venue or on facebook selling tickets for cash/paypal, and it's 50/50 on whether it's legit or not. Which is exactly how sites like StubHub work. Some people travel and get hotels with these resold tickets, and find out they were sold multiple times, or were fraudulent and at best can only get the ticket price back, and either pay more for a new one last minute, or be left with a hotel and vacation to sit outside the show. There's nothing the venue can do, I went to a show recently that sent day of QR codes to try and prevent resale, and scalpers either mirror the app with a link, or take a picture. You can't check ID's at a 100,000 + person event.
- Pet_Ant 11mo agoI think tickets should be auctioned by the venue. It means there is no incentive for bots or scalpers.
- littlestymaar 11mo agoIt also means price end up being too expensive for many fans to go. There's a reason why concerts prices are set to a much lower price that what scalpers can resell them, it's because the artists usually don't seek to extract the most money for a tour and they'd rather give their fans an opportunity to see them instead. (As long as it's profitable indeed, but there's a big gap).
- rvz 11mo agoAt this point, making money will become illegal in the United Kingdom.
- orian 11mo agoBut why? If one may resell apartment for profit, why do we regulate tickets?
- dzhiurgis 11mo agoGood luck enforcing this. > Buy this NFT and get free tickets to X.