Engadget Is My Go-To Source For Bad Economic Analysis. Today's Lesson: Apparently Items Are More Valuable If You Can't Resell Them
The following from Endadget may be clearer if you translate the British "touts" to the American "scalpers"
Touts are unnecessary middlemen, inflating ticket prices purely to create a cut for themselves. Gig-goers hate them, artists hate them, and the government isn't too keen either. The use of automated online bots to hoover up tickets (that are later listed on resale sites with a mark-up) is set to become a criminal offence thanks to the Digital Economy Act. The government has also implored venues and resale sites to address the ways they might be enabling touts. Sure, we might be lose the stub souvenir, but can we just make digital-only ticketing mandatory and kill all the birds with one stone already?
This view of scalpers as leeching middlemen with no economic value but rather as rent-seekers who merely mark up tickets and pocket the money is unfortunately common. But they are in fact a perfectly normal functioning of markets. They perform at least two economic functions
- Events often are mispriced for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they charge too much, as in the recent McGregor-Mayweather fight, and the arena is half-empty. The market can't do much to fix this. But sometimes events are under-priced, and the demand far exceeds the available supply of tickets. When this happens, some method of rationing must occur. Back in my day rationing was by who was lucky enough to dial in at the exact right moment or who was willing to camp out all night. Resale markets, including scalpers, where tickets are resold well above face value are another approach. Scalpers don't make money taking some sort of middleman fee, they make money buying tickets at face and then taking the risk that they can resell them later at a higher price. They are not always successful. I have sold a number of tickets I could no longer use under face to get rid of them, taking a loss.
- If you cannot resell a ticket to the person you want for the price you like, you lose some of your property rights in that ticket and it is less valuable to you. Look at airline tickets, which are all electronic today and cannot be resold or transferred. Are you better off as a consumer not having a secondary market for airline tickets? Do you really like tickets that are use-them-or-lose-them propositions? The contention in this article that consumers are better off if their concert tickets worked more like airline tickets is simply nonsense. Scalpers increase our consumer sovereignty.
It should be noted that a digital ticket does not automatically mean loss of property rights in that ticket. I bought Dallas Cowboys playoff tickets and Hamilton tickets on a secondary market and got them transferred to me electronically. The Ticketmaster electronic app, at least currently, allows you to transfer the ticket to someone else and so digital ticketing platforms don't have to mean scalpers go away -- one could easily imagine two guys in a parking lot can still transact in tickets from their cell phones. But the danger, of course, is that unlike with paper tickets this right of resale can be taken away any time by simply blocking the transfer function. The article does not make this clear but I assume they are promoting a platform where once you buy the ticket you can only resell it back via the original seller (if at all), or else the entire article would be complete nonsense (always a possibility on engadget).
Artists and producers are complete hypocrites on this issue. They are jealous because they would like to charge what the market could bear for their tickets but fear fan backlash if they do. So they keep prices low so they can claim to be the fan's friend, but with a catch -- they hold back a ton of inventory in the hottest shows and do not offer that to the public at the published low price. They sell this inventory at high prices to sponsors and other special groups or even sell it themselves at high market rates on the same 3rd party resale sites they publicly criticize. What these folks really want is for there only to be secondary markets that they control. They don't want competition from third parties, and this lack of competition is only going to be worse for the consumer. Think of it this way -- what if by law you could only resell your car to the dealer you bought it from. Would you get as good of a price. Hah!
