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.
There exist only so many performance days in an entertainer’s lifetime. And, obviously, venues have capacity limits.
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.
There are only so many seats in a venue. Suppose there are 1000 seats and 5000 people want tickets. What's your plan on how to allocate them?
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.
Because this answer has absolutely nothing to do with price signal as a economic concept.
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
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.
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.
What about some middle ground - allow sale for and below the purchase price and punish severely any profiteering? The only reason scalpers do it is for money - if the punishment and risk are big enough it solved itself.
Where I live, the biggest festival in whole country (Paleo @Switzerland) explicitly bans resale for some time and nobody real is complaining, its fair and tickets are sold within minutes of becoming available.
The last point - if some psycho is starting to shoot others because they can't go to some fucking concert then the underlying condition needs to be targeted, not sweeping reality in front of them so they never trip on some obstacle in real life. 'Eat the rich' trope is stuff immature frustrated kids tell to peers, nothing more.
The only reason people work and run businesses is for money. Not doing it for money is called a "hobby", "charity" and "volunteering".
There is no requirement for perfect information in order for a free market to function. The term for lack of perfect information is "risk" and is factored in to negotiations and the price.
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.
How does scalping, which transfers money from fans, artists, and the music industry to ticket touts who have nothing to do with music, "incentivise the creation" of anything? Except, I suppose, bot farms and clickfarm sweatshops?
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.
> a mutually agreeable trade that would otherwise have increased the utility of both parties.
Yet many people, possibly most people, feel something is broken.
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).
The KPI of profit has become harmful enough that people like Thiel observe that the system isn’t working anymore.