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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34457 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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The ticketmaster thing is a problem in the sense that it’s creating artificial scarcity. Her tickets are not sold out at the price she offered or at least not to humans. Tickets have been captured by bot-buyers who buy the entire lot for resale. Humans simply cannot buy the tickets at list price from the venue because they sell out in mere milliseconds after the “public” sale — all to TM and a few other resellers. And so it’s not that the fans aren’t really fans if they rebuy from TM, it’s that TM has used bots to get themselves a virtual monopoly on ticket sales for concerts and large events.

How is there artificial scarcity? The bots aren't reducing the supply of tickets.

As OP said though, that "artificial scarcity" is just market pricing + inefficient secondhand market distribution. "not sold at the price she offered to humans" is the market pricing it - there's more demand than supply, so price increases, and if the original seller isn't willing to do that an automated intermediary will do it (and if you ban that somehow, human intermediaries will do it instead). None of that solves the problem of scarcity - there are way fewer tickets than there is demand for tickets at the price offered, raising the price just means they're sold to the subset of buyers-at-initial-price who can pay more as opposed to the subset of buyers-at-initial price who click fast enough

there's way more supply and demand

You mean more demand than supply

yeah fixed

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