I agree that ticketing is a difficult problem, but getting rid of scalping is easy if that’s your primary objective. Pricing the externalities of event-goers is tough, especially when anti-discrimination legislation means you generally can’t be upfront about it.
So there is the problem: The ideal of non-discrimination is not compatible with cases where the demographics of event-goers is itself a strong influence on the quality of the event for everyone involved.
In the ancestral post, I recommend auctioning off the tickets. This ensures that the people who are willing to pay the most get the tickets, dramatically reducing the demand and increasing the risk for scalpers (if I buy a $20 ticket to a show I expect to sell out, a price decline is unlikely, and even if it happens it’s probably only a few bucks per ticket. If I buy a $500 ticket to a show I expect to sell out, a price decline could wipe me out).
Now, you could still have people buying tickets at auction to sell at the door to people who weren’t prepared, but that won’t be a moral issue since you’ve already established that the tickets go to the highest bidder.
gwern rightly points out that this doesn’t always deliver the best experience. The good first approaches to diversity are quotas and subsidies. They might offer burning man attendance at historical prices to people who have come previously, and then auction off a batch of tickets to new attendees, or give previous attendees vouchers which increase their bids by a set amount or a multiplier. (Content providers could even be paid for their trouble.) Whatever you decide you want to encourage, though, you’re better off working with the price system than against the price system.
I agree that ticketing is a difficult problem, but getting rid of scalping is easy if that’s your primary objective. Pricing the externalities of event-goers is tough, especially when anti-discrimination legislation means you generally can’t be upfront about it.
So there is the problem: The ideal of non-discrimination is not compatible with cases where the demographics of event-goers is itself a strong influence on the quality of the event for everyone involved.
I don’t get the impression that getting rid of scalping is easy at all. What do you have in mind?
In the ancestral post, I recommend auctioning off the tickets. This ensures that the people who are willing to pay the most get the tickets, dramatically reducing the demand and increasing the risk for scalpers (if I buy a $20 ticket to a show I expect to sell out, a price decline is unlikely, and even if it happens it’s probably only a few bucks per ticket. If I buy a $500 ticket to a show I expect to sell out, a price decline could wipe me out).
Now, you could still have people buying tickets at auction to sell at the door to people who weren’t prepared, but that won’t be a moral issue since you’ve already established that the tickets go to the highest bidder.
gwern rightly points out that this doesn’t always deliver the best experience. The good first approaches to diversity are quotas and subsidies. They might offer burning man attendance at historical prices to people who have come previously, and then auction off a batch of tickets to new attendees, or give previous attendees vouchers which increase their bids by a set amount or a multiplier. (Content providers could even be paid for their trouble.) Whatever you decide you want to encourage, though, you’re better off working with the price system than against the price system.