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204 points pabs3 | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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kassner ◴[] No.44092014[source]
I can’t claim I’m the first one to think about this, but every time Ticketmaster shows up on HN I keep coming back to this idea:

Sell the tickets with regressive price based on time. Sales starts say 2 months before event, initial price is truly exorbitant, say one million dollars. Price decreases linearly down to zero (or true cost price). At any point, people can see current price and the seats left.

Now every potential spectator is playing a game of chicken: the more you wait, the lower the price, but also lower are the chances that you’ll have a ticket. That would capture precisely the maximum amount of dollars that each person is willing to pay for it.

This idea sounds extremely greedy, because it is, so I can’t fathom that no one ever pitched this in a Ticketmaster board meeting.

My idea, however, was a bit less greedy. Once you sold the last ticket, that would be your actual (and fair) price-per-ticket for the concert, and everyone would be refunded the difference. You’ll never know how low it will go, so you shouldn’t overpay and hope it will lower later. I’m pretty sure Ticketmaster will skip this last part if they decide to implement this.

There are multiple issues with my idea, it’s elitist, promotes financial risks on cohorts poorly capable to bear them, etc etc, but it will definitely fix the scalpers problem. Pick your poison.

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1. Spooky23 ◴[] No.44097335[source]
Don’t worry, there’s no greedy, rent-seeking rock that hasn’t been overturned. Your idea would cost them way too much money. Since we’ve embraced scalping as a legal business model, Ticketmaster makes money on all sides of most transactions. It’s in their interest to for you to have maximum anxiety and buy as early as possible to increase the odds that you’ll resell.

The bots and scrapers aren’t black hat, Ticketmaster makes some nominal effort to “stop them”, but somehow those pesky hackers manage to figure out how to make Ticketmaster more money. Ticketmaster is adept at making the purchase experience high friction and difficult, so those bots must be really clever. (Lol)

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2. bugtodiffer ◴[] No.44097527[source]
Ticketmaster is reselling themselves, so they only prevent other peoples bots lol
3. section_me ◴[] No.44098672[source]
Sounds like Valve/Steam and the CS:GO gambling.