My simple solution to stop scalping

[Maphistos_Sidekick]

Just to clarify, looking at the first step:

"The vendor did not announce a price when buyers joined the queue, but people completing the transaction at the time the queue was joined were paying ‘X’ " isn’t legal in the UK?

That feels odd in a country where a couple of motor insurers have used random number generators when offering a price.

[The_Polymath]

The standard tickets before people joined the qeue were £x

Thats the price that people saw before they joined the queue.

After hours of waiting in the e-queue, they tickets became 4*£x when they finally got through.

Consumer laws dont let you do that in the UK.

[Maphistos_Sidekick]

@The_Polymath

Thats the price that people saw before they joined the queue.

…and that’s the precise element I was poking at.

In my admittedly limited experience of Ticketmaster queues, I don’t recall Ticketmaster telling me prices until I got through the queue…and therefore I’d have no grounds to complain about bait-and-switch.

Within reason, the transaction is between Ticketmaster and me, and the price paid by someone ahead of me in the queue is irrelevant.

However it is possible that Ticketmaster did give me information when I was deciding to join the queue and I didn’t register the information. If that were the case, depending on what was said… that would definitely be a naughty bait-and-switch tactic.

[The_Polymath]

Here is a comment from an economist that went through the entire debacle.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with dynamic pricing, per se, and most UK consumers are well informed about how it works for airlines, hotel rooms and taxis. So why did we feel “mugged off” by Oasis but not by easyJet or Uber? I think three reasons.

First, and I suspect this will be an important part of any investigation (if it happens), we didn’t know dynamic pricing was being used before we started the process; the realisation at the end felt exploitative.

Second, the exploitation was enhanced by the psychological combination of revealing lower prices early and then only seeing the actual price after you had been stuck in a queue for 5 hours, desperate not to lose your place again and with only a minute to decide; the sunk cost fallacy at play but still very real (it would be interesting to know how much lower the yield would have been if, say, 50% of fans had dropped out earlier, thus reducing “demand”, once they knew what rules they were locked into).

Third, the use of dynamic pricing to manage demand seems odd here; they knew the demand was high from the minute they announced so the value they are extracting here is not related to my early booking (flights) or my desire to travel at peak (taxis) but simply to how the queuing system placed us when we all logged in at exactly 9am. The strategy appears to be maximum value extraction, via deception, targeting those who were just unlucky with the system. I think I would have actually felt more comfortable if they had employed a Dutch auction system, with falling prices; open at £1000 per ticket and then keep dropping the price until the last one goes. A ballot, or even a test to flush out true fans, would be more fair but not as lucrative.

[dr_t_non-fan]

The irrationality of fans is being exploited.
They should stop being irrational.
I know I have when it comes to live music.

Aren’t Oasis fans kind of like hockey fans? Are they there for the music or the eventual fight onstage?

[Maphistos_Sidekick]

That is an excellent and fair explanation. Thanks.