4 ms·

It 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

by mrtksn 1y ago

It 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_ 1y ago
seller 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 1y ago
  People 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_ 1y ago
    if 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 1y 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 1y ago
        Amazing 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 1y ago
        That 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 1y ago
  why can’t I just pay ticketmaster the face value, why must we allow another middleman to charges me more? because capitalism? na mate
  - lotsofpulp 1y 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 1y ago
  That 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 1y ago
    That's not an auction. It's just entity A selling to entity B and entity B selling to entity C.
    - helsinkiandrew 1y ago
      Sorry, 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 1y ago
  Seller 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 1y ago
    Original 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 1y ago
  That 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 1y ago
  [dead]
WalterBright 1y ago
Free markets optimize for utility. Profit is just a side effect of that.
- mrtksn 1y ago
  Whatever 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 1y ago
    Nobody has implemented a better system.
    - mrtksn 1y ago
      IMHO 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 1y ago
        The 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 1y ago
        Not 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.
        deleted 1y ago

by mrtksn 1y ago

_dain_ 1y ago

seller 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 1y ago
People 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_ 1y ago
  if 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 1y 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 1y ago
      Amazing 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 1y ago
        That 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 1y ago
why can’t I just pay ticketmaster the face value, why must we allow another middleman to charges me more? because capitalism? na mate
- lotsofpulp 1y 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 1y ago
That 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 1y ago
  That's not an auction. It's just entity A selling to entity B and entity B selling to entity C.
  - helsinkiandrew 1y ago
    Sorry, 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 1y ago
Seller 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 1y ago
  Original 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 1y ago
That 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 1y ago
[dead]

WalterBright 1y ago

Free markets optimize for utility. Profit is just a side effect of that.

mrtksn 1y ago
Whatever 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 1y ago
  Nobody has implemented a better system.
  - mrtksn 1y ago
    IMHO 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 1y ago
      The 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 1y ago
        Not 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.
      - deleted 1y ago