This “indian” objects to it because it was a custom introduced by White savages to destroy civilized cultures in order to steal their land.
However, I can apreciate the attempt at humor. We can allways use more of that.
To the OP:
I once saw an experiment with legal on-site scalping. The scalpers were allowed to resell tickets in a limited area. It seemed to work out well. By bunching them up it allowed consumers to compare prices more easily. Fewwer people seemed to overpay for seats. Of course, the scalpers didn’t like it much.
Just putting my 2sense in.
Tyranny,* like Hell*,* is not easily conquered*.
-Thomas Paine (fugitive slave catcher)
Scalping AFAIK has always been legal in California. If you look at the back of a ticket, you will see the restriction about reselling tickets at the site of an event, but that’s the only restriction.
A father of a coworker of mine operated a ticket agency in LA. He detested the word “scalper.” He called himself a “ticket broker.” Despite the semantics, the end result is the same: In California, if you buy a ticket for something, you can resell it to anyone for whatever price you can get, as long as you don’t do it on the grounds of the event.
Get any yellow pages in California and look for “Ticket agencies”. They don’t get listed under “Scalpers”, for the same reason that an attorney doesn’t like be listed under the heading of “shyster”.
The issue of selling tickets on ebay has come
up, and as I understand it, it is perfectly
legal to put them up for the face value (i.e.
$50). If people want to offer you more as the
auction goes on for 10 days, that’s their
choice, and totally legal.
If you ask someone to pay you for sex, it’s
illegal; if they give you a green thank you,
it’s not.
First, scalping is possible only when some people are prepared to pay more for tickets than what they were orginally sold for. This must mean that the promoter or venue sold them for less than what they could have sold the tickets for. The first part of the puzzle is why they would do this (assuming that they’re not feeling generous).
Suppose I am a stadium owner looking to price a sporting event. The long term profitability of my venue may be increased by not squeezing the last dollar out of ticket sales for each event. For a sporting event I may get higher season attendances and more loyal fans if price does not vary much between the most and least popular games. For a concert, the type of people who get tickets when they are underpriced may be more willing to shell out for t-shirts etc. Cheap concerts are a good way of selling CDs too.
The general story here is that the attributes of the “good” being sold here may be more complex than just today’s game or concert and that the attributes of customers may be important. Fans who are prepared to queue for two days to get tickets for a gig will probably improve the atmosphere of the show.
This holds for sport too. If you maximise revenue from ticket sales for a football game, you will get a bunch of stiffs who will not contribute much to the entertainment. A few “theatre goers” in high priced corporate boxes are fine, but too many spoil the atmosphere and undermine the long-term profitability of the stadium, the team and the sport.
What this means is that a pricing policy where scalpers may find it profitable to operate (remember that scalpers who buy tickets to events that do not sell out will lose) generates economic rent which is shared between stadium owners and performers (in the form of profit) and customers in the form of getting to see a show for less than what you were prepared to pay for it (what economists call consumer surplus).
This is where previous replies of the “supply and demand” type miss the tension of what is going on here. When a scalper operates, it is true to say that tickets will tend to go from people who value the ticket less to people who value it more, with no participants coerced. However, this dissipates the rents associated with the pricing policy, which may reduce the long-term incentives to produce music or theatre or sport It is not obvious which is more important.
As to the second part of the story, the government may make scalping illegal for a number of reasons:
1 They might view the social gains from the underpricing of tickets to outweigh any losses from disallowing resale (government intervenes to correct market failure).
2 The gains to producers are large and concentrated whilst any losses to consumers are small and barely noticable (government intervenes to protect interests of the powerful).
3 For some reason that they can’t put the fingers on, people don’t like scalpers (government reflects ill-informed community values).
4 The tickets usually have a clause that states resale are not allowed (government enforces contract law, judging the clause not to be sufficiently anti-competitive top worry about).
Wha? I condemn communism, and I think that a free market solves (almost) everything. The first point has been verified by history, and the second is a close relative of the first. I don’t follow the irony you see.
It’s like one person saying, “I say 1+1=3 and that’s the truth” while another person says, “I say 1+1=2 and that’s the truth.” The fact that they both say it’s truth doesn’t make it so. And there’s no great irony that they both use the same declaration. One’s right, one’s wrong.
I though this thread was about the other kind of scalping.
You know… haircuts down to here (points at neck).
I sure was suprised at the post that said it was legal in California.
“Whoa, Nelly!! I knew things were bad, out there in Lotusland, but Holy Sh*t!!”
You should tell the truth, expose the lies and live in the moment."-Bill Hicks
“You should tell the lies, live the truth and expose yourself.” - Bill Clinton
