Monday, November 28, 2005

Ticket Auctions

My cousin was complaining about how difficult it was to buy Red Sox tickets. One of the culprits are scalpers, who resell tickets at exorbitant profits on eBay. This suggests that Red Sox tickets are underpriced. Some teams are solving this problem by running auctions to sell tickets. Hence tickets are sold at true market value, which prevents scalpers from profiting.

But what about the poor? Well they can't get the tickets now anyway, unless they're one of the few who got lucky. And an auction at least gives the poor an opportunity to get tickets if they really want them. When supply exceeds demand, someone needs to be disappointed, and it might as well be those who are willing to pay the least.

Now let's hope the Red Sox do something good this year with that money.