text: Cornering the market on ticket sales | The Hardball Times
  An idea came to me today during my microeconomics discussion section, and I'd like to flesh out my thoughts on it here for people to see and to possibly get some feedback. The section readings for today included one about Bunker Hunt, the Texas oil man who tried to corner the world's market for silver, and an Associated Press article about the San Francisco Giants' ticket pricing scheme. I think you can guess which one I'm going to write about here.
  So the Giants are doing this little test run to see if the fans have a negative reaction to it. Fans might react negatively because you could be paying, say, $50 for your seat, but the guy next to you might be paying $40 because of dynamic pricing. Seems like a decent way to anger fans who feel they were ripped off, right? But this is currently happening every single day. Ever heard of StubHub.com? The example doesn't do much right now because World Series ticket prices are jacked up anyway, but if I go over there in March looking to buy tickets for opening day, I'd have to pay three or four times face value for a ticket, maybe even more. Fans will pay higher prices for games they really want to see, and they currently are already.
  Right now, teams are losing out on the money made from the secondary market for tickets (a.k.a. StubHub and the like). There are fans who are paying a higher price for tickets they really want on StubHub, and teams are still only taking in the face value of the ticket. Five paragraphs in and here's my idea: Why doesn't a team like the Giants (as an example), who are open to pricing experimentation, create their own secondary market for tickets in an attempt to capture some of the revenue lost from resales?
  7 Comments on "Cornering the market on ticket sales"
  Pretty sure MLBAM was doing this on behalf of teams a few years back (read: MLBAM owns the internet, as far as MLB teams are concerned), but realized a handful of things, greatest of which was that having StubHub do this and just collecting a percentage from them was waaaayyyy more efficient. Teams cannot do much of anything, where incremental revenue is concerned anyway, on their own on the web (exaggeration, but more slight than gross). Up-front ticket sales are the exception, hence this crazy (but is it just crazy enough Jerry that it blew your mind!?) system the Giants… Read more »
  "Price discrimination is completely legal and ethical, by the way. Car dealerships do it all the time."
  I believe this is the first time that the word "ethical" and the phrase "car dealerships" have ever been linked.
  Hi, Dan. I am following up on behalf of the Executive Customer Care Department at StubHub. We read your comment and appreciate the opportunity to clarify some information about StubHub. We are an online secondary marketplace website where fans are able to purchase tickets from individual sellers. We are not a Box Office and have no direct affiliation with any venue. Sellers are able to set their own prices for tickets listed on our site and market demand by our buyers drives both pricing and competition between our sellers. As part of our User Agreement, sellers are responsible to comply… Read more »