Scalpers drive Harry Potter play prices from £140 to £8,327

[Brainspore]

@atl

Either I am not being clear or you misunderstand. My suggestion was to build in a contingent price for a ticket purchaser – say $100 if you use it personally, $1,000 if someone else does (just to throw out some numbers) – whether it’s pay $1000 and get back $900, or pay $100 and get penalized $900 is of no economic consequence.

I see at least three problems with that approach:

• Sales, penalties and refunds would be a huge headache for everyone involved.
• They system could only be enforced if they had a reliable way of knowing if the person with the ticket was the same person who made the original purchase. If they could do that then they wouldn’t have so much trouble policing scalping.
• The approach would still limit ticket sales to people who had enough money to pay a huge deposit on their tickets. So in your scenario, the ticket could still only go to someone who had at least a spare $1000 sitting around in their bank account.