The idea is that if venues can sell tickets at higher prices, to the rich or silly (via resellers or not), you get more venues and more acts, even at the low end where tickets are cheap, because it's bigger business.

Nobody wants an algorithm that leaves them without a ticket, and that includes your proposals.

> the people with the most money

That's not the algorithm employed. The algorithm is "the people who are willing to outbid the others". That is quite different.

Besides, with a lottery you won't know if you got the ticket until the last minute. How are you going to make plans with your sweetie, then? Or are traveling from out of town?

During communist years here in Eastern Europe, we got to experience the "knowing people in the Nomenklatura and Party" resource allocation algorithm.

It was obvious to us that the "people with most money" algorithm was vastly superior since it made people work harder to get those money, thus enhancing the society. Also, the extra cash strongly incentivized and funded people to create more of the scarce resource.

The other algorithms failed to incentivize to such a degree that in the end we were starving and freezing because nobody wanted to work to create food, heat or any other products and services anymore.