John Oliver has a recent episode talking about ticket sales to live concerts and why they cost so much. Because he's John Oliver and that's approximately his job, he directs a fair amount of criticism towards large corporations, in this case Ticketmaster, but does spread it around a bit to scalpers and sometimes even the artists themselves; he accuses Justin Bieber of in one occasion "scalping his own tickets" (i.e. selling a reserved ticket on the secondary market) and describes it as "doesn't feel great, does it?".

Tickets to live performances are a fundamentally scarce item; you can only fit so many people in one place. The way we usually allocate scarce things in a market economy is, y'know, money. If the demand is higher then the price goes up. If you sell tickets for $20 and someone is willing to pay $50, then some people will race to buy as many $20 tickets as they can and sell them for $50 for a neat profit.

That money going to the scalper seems kind of unfair when they haven't added any value, but if you don't want it to go to them, and you don't want it to go to Ticketmaster, and you aren't really happy when it goes to the artist either... who should get it?

One answer would be "the concertgoers"; instead of allocating tickets by who can pay the most you sell them at some price you have decided is fair and choose by I guess lottery or something who gets the opportunity to pay for them, and presumably tie them to identity in some reliable way that will definitely not get bypassed one way or another.

Here's the thing: suppose you have won the ticket lottery and someone comes up to you and says "hey, I did not get in, can I buy your ticket?" and quotes you some amount and you decide you'd rather have the money than go see the concert. In that case, the prohibition on reselling is not doing you a favour, because you'd rather have money than the ticket. It's not doing the person offering to buy from you a favour, because they'd rather have the ticket than the money. It's not doing the artist a favour, they get the same money either way. It's not making anyone else not involved in the transaction a favour, they are unaffected by it. As far as I can tell, everyone is worse off than if you did allow resales; but then you're in the scalper situation where a lot of the money for the ticket goes to people who added no value and were just lucky to be able to buy a scarce good for less than it was worth.

There's a sense where "everyone pays the 'fair price' and who gets to see the concert is decided at random", in comparison to "everyone pays however much they're willing to and who gets to see it is decided by who is willing to pay more", is a transfer of value from rich people to poor people; if you can't afford to pay as much, then the lottery improves your chances. But it's also a transfer of value from people who care more to people who care less: If tickets cost less, more people would buy them, for all the usual reasons people are more willing to buy cheaper things. Some of them would be people who can't otherwise afford them, but some of them would be people who can afford them but value them less. Since it's random, some of them would get in, which seems inefficient; surely you want to give those scarce seats to the people who value them more.

My intuition is, basically, that I want that money going to the artist and the venue; they're the ones who are providing value, and, besides, the more profitable concerts are you'd expect the more of them an artist makes (maybe not? maybe the kind of artist that sells out concert venues quickly is already making as many concerts as they can and them being more profitable wouldn't change it). I can see the appeal of the lottery in terms of "would be nice if people who want to but don't have a lot of money could have some chance of seeing concerts", but it seems difficult to justify; might be better if you have limited lotteries where only a fraction of tickets are sold cheaply to lucky winners and the rest are priced by however much people are willing to pay. In some ideal sense you'd want to assign them to people who want them the most but there's no obvious way to measure that that isn't gameable somehow.

I get the impression most people complaining about it aren't actually advocating for lotteries, though; they want cheaper tickets so they can go to the concert, and the lottery doesn't improve their chances of that. There's still only N seats, so only N people will go. But there really isn't a solution that gives you cheap enough tickets for everyone who wants to go beyond having more concerts.

(open to hearing what other people think is intuitively "fairer", here)