We expect Ryanair tickets to cost more on holiday Saturdays than term-time Tuesdays and Uber fares to surge in the rush hour. When bidders drive an Old Master painting into the millions, we praise the skill of the auctioneer. And of course dynamic prices can go down as well as up. These are market mechanisms to match supply and demand, recognising that some buyers will pay more than others for desirable scarce goods. So why the hoo-hah about ticket prices for Oasis’s reunion tour, which doubled as supply dwindled for those towards the end of the online queue?
Labour ministers, Brussels bureaucrats and US justice officials have all declared that the Ticketmaster sales platform needs looking into, while commentators agree that any such offer should at least be fully transparent. Fans should know they’ll pay more if they’re late, just as they would if they bought from a tout. Maybe a fixed-price ballot system would be ‘fairer’.
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