Dynamic Pricing at Concerts
The discussion
Nadia: Dynamic pricing for concert tickets should be banned. Last month tickets I was watching jumped from eighty to three hundred while I was in the online queue, and that isn't a market, it's an ambush.
Sebastian: From an economics point of view, it's just letting the price reflect demand. If the venue charges eighty for a seat worth three hundred, the difference goes to touts reselling it, so the artist might as well capture it.
Ravi: I'd accept demand-based pricing if it were transparent. The problem Nadia describes is that the price changed mid-purchase without any warning, which feels like the rules were switched after the game started.
Nadia: Even with warning, it prices out exactly the young fans who built the artist's career. Music isn't a flight to a business meeting.
Sebastian: But banning it won't make the tickets cheaper for those fans, Nadia. It just means the resale sites profit instead, unless you also ban resale above face value.
Ravi: Then do both. Cap resale at face value and require platforms to show the price range before the queue opens. That keeps Sebastian's logic while removing the ambush.
Nadia: I could live with that, actually. If I know the range beforehand and touts can't profit, my objection is mostly about honesty rather than the principle.