That’s not a fair assessment of the organizers’ skill level.
They seem to have a nice firm grip on the effect of fixed supply, fixed price, and increasing demand:
And in those regards, the ticket selection system worked as planned — but it created other unforeseen problems, and most of them boil down to an unpredicted, overwhelming level of demand. The impact of that demand is beyond what we projected when designing the system; even if we knew there were destined to be some people missing out, we didn’t expect nearly so many.
What they didn’t predict was that the expectation of scarcity would further increase demand, creating a positive feedback loop. In their words:
there was a fair amount of over-registration – those who said “I need one but I’ll order two…” or “I’m not sure I’m going but I’ll get one just in case.” We can now see that some of that happened simply because the perception of scarcity drove fear and action for all of us.
So, they understand supply and demand (they just made a bad factual estimate of demand), and they didn’t really understand game theory—but after they made their mistake they publicly admitted it, asked around to see what they did wrong, and proposed strategies for mitigating the mistake.
That’s not a fair assessment of the organizers’ skill level.
They seem to have a nice firm grip on the effect of fixed supply, fixed price, and increasing demand:
What they didn’t predict was that the expectation of scarcity would further increase demand, creating a positive feedback loop. In their words:
So, they understand supply and demand (they just made a bad factual estimate of demand), and they didn’t really understand game theory—but after they made their mistake they publicly admitted it, asked around to see what they did wrong, and proposed strategies for mitigating the mistake.
Why are we mocking them again?