Ticket Pricing in the Age of the Internet

Peter Tracey recently directed me to a column by Terrance Corcoran. Apparently, Industry Minister Tony Clement is looking into ways to address ticket retailers who are engaged in uncompetitive practices.

In Ottawa, Industry Minister Tony Clement declared himself to be a "regular concert goer," making him therefore qualified to take action against Ticketmaster and its associated resale arm, TicketsNow. "The government won't stand idly by when there is potential that companies may be engaged in uncompetitive practices that are hurting consumers," he said. Mr. Clement dispatched the Competition Bureau to investigate.

In Ontario, no slouch in maintaining high farm prices, Premier Dalton McGuinty is preparing legislation to protect Britney Spears consumers by going after Ticketmaster and setting up an apparently beefier anti-scalping law than the existing one. Ontario's Attorney General, Chris Bentley, said "What Ontarians want is fair access. This is about consumer protection." Various class-action lawyers and U. S. politicians are also getting into the concert pricing regulation business.

Even the performers are restless, with old boy lefties like Bruce Springsteen reportedly "furious" that tickets for his welfare-state priced concerts -- $90 to $250 -- were being sold at higher prices on the TicketsNow resale site before the regular sales process had run its course.

Corcoran argues that there is no need to regulate this market as the internet has taken over the position once held by scalpers, in doing so imposing some market discipline on ticket pricing.

Almost overnight, the buying and selling of tickets for sports, concerts, theatre and other live events has gone from the moribund paper era to the electronic era. The market took over scalping, bringing market prices to tickets that in the past were sold only once at what the concert promoters thought and hoped would be the right profit-maximizing price. If not, if the price was set too low, too bad. The market died with the first sale, except for a few scalped tickets at the door on the day of the event.

There is no need for politicians to attempt to control this market. In fact, that would be the worst approach. The rise of online market sales makes it possible for performers, promoters, ticket sellers and resellers to capture top market value. The major beneficiaries will be the performers, who for the first time will be able use auctions and other pricing mechanisms to get the most out of their performances.

I wonder if Tony Clement has thought about Trent Reznor's suggestions for stopping scalping.

Trent Reznor on Ticket Scalping, the Ticket Market, and Auctions

Here's the post from Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. Reznor offers some interesting ways to stop scalping (e.g., printing names on tickets) and some thoughts on how the ticketing agencies will change with future consolidation (e.g., auctioning tickets).

Halloween Economics

With Halloween approaching, I thought it might be fun to bring to your attention a new paper by Dean Karlan et al. This is a great paper on an important and interesting field experiment.

In the paper, the authors discuss and experiment conducted on Halloween 2007 in which they had trick-or-treaters (you know the kids who show up at your door asking for candy) to choose from an ambiguous urn of types of candy or an urn in which the distribution of candy types was known. Here's the abstract:

We examine whether ambiguity aversion correlates with costume choice amongst children at Halloween. We conducted an ambiguity aversion experiment with children on Halloween during trick-or-treating and correlated this with their choice of costumes. We find that children wearing the most commonly chosen costumes are more likely to avoid a gamble with ambiguous odds. This inquiry is in line with a series of recent papers observing whether choices in simple experimental economics games correlate with theoretically similar non-laboratory behavior.

They actually conducted two experiments, but the second one resulted in such a long queue outside one of the author's house that it proved infeasible. In the results section, they discuss a number of kids who particpated in the experiment but were not wearing costumes. Who shows up to go trick-or-treating without a costume? Maybe you forget a bag or something to carry your Halloween bounty in, but no costume? Which brings up the other question, who gives kids with no costume a treat on Haloween? If they don't have a costume, aren't they chaperones? I usually offer the adults in this "trick-or-treaters" a choice between an urn with an ambiguous distribution of beer or known candy. When given this type of offer, they display no ambiguity aversion.


The complete paper is available here.

The Economics of Drive-Throughs

A recent article in the Calgary Herald (“Customers are getting fed up over wait times at retail outlets”, August 27 2008) cited a new study finding evidence that "86% (of Canadian consumers) say that least once they have re-shelved their purchases or skipped the coffee and left the store" due to long lines.

Interestingly, the reporter interviewed a customer at Tim Horton’s. (For those not familiar with Tim Horton’s, it’s a very popular chain of Canadian coffee/donut shops. They are famous for something called a "double-double" which is a coffee with two creams and two sugars.) Being a non-Canadian, I find the Tim Horton’s phenomenon amazing: Aside from serving what I think is very bad coffee, every Tim Horton’s seems to have huge line of customers. In MacEwan Hall on the University of Calgary campus, there are at least three coffee places of which Tim Horton’s is the only one with a significant line (sometimes in excess of 25 people).

A new Tim Horton’s recently opened relatively close to my house. It is included with a Shell station and is about two blocks from another Tim Horton’s (located in an Esso station). What is amazing about the new Tim Horton’s (aside form the fact that people actually drink this coffee) is the lineup at the drive-through. My guess is that it averages six cars throughout the day and I’ve counted as many as 22 cars in the morning. This latter amount is so many that it blocks people from getting gas at the Shell station.

This leads me to wonder a bit about the environmental costs of drive-through services. Most of the cars in the lines are idling, which is probably the least efficient use of one's car. Moreover, most of the people in the drive-through are able-bodied and would be able to purchase their double-double from the line inside (where, incidentally, there are multiple servers as opposed to a single server at the drive through).

Due to these environmental costs, some communities have sought to regulate or even ban drive-throughs. I offer my $.02 on this issue: I think it would be wise for businesses offering drive-through services to include a surcharge for these services. Individuals using the drive-through are likely doing so as a matter of convenience and this convenience is something the company can charge for. By increasing costs the drive-through, firms will capitalize on this additional convenience they provide and increase the cost of idling your car in line. Essentially, this is a profit-maximizing way for firms to get individuals internalize the environmental externality they are imposing when waiting in line at the drive through.

Of course, there may be fairness issues regarding those individuals who use the drive-through because they are less mobile (e.g., the elderly, individuals with physical handicaps). I guess this is all simply food for thought (although I wouldn’t recommend Tim Horton’s donuts either).