I think he just means the right price for the company to set, to maximise profits in the longterm.

Define right price.

It is not necessarily irrational to resent price gouging if the resentment prevents it. If in fact this is a social loss then it is a coordination problem and a whole different ball game. By that I mean neither side is likely to benefit by changing all by itself.

I think that you aren’t being as curious as you might be about possible reasons for this not being popular. For example vendors might want a direct relationship with the customer for mailshots and the like. They might want people to know how much they might have to spend on tickets so that they can plan to make the time and money available—airlines definitely had that problem. Customer enjoyment might be lessened by diferent prices—The adverse selection problems caused by high ticket prices aka the prawn sandwich effect. Trust generated by comparability of prices. I could go on.

As an experiment, how many things do you know the right price for? What is the most you would pay for the water you consume this week?

Looked up the story.

http://arts.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/06/14/ngeld14.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/06/14/ixhome.html

It’s a classic writing credit/royalty dispute. Geldof gets paid for the songs who wrote, the band claim they had some input and should get a share, or that they had a special deal that they would, that wasn’t honoured. Happens all the time, sometimes it’s true, sometimes it’s not.

So this “He is the one who is made a career out of the misfortune of others, not the people of eBay. And the misfortune of others includes he own bandmates” is hardly an accurate picture.

Even then, Darren’s prose isn’t necessarily the best in the world and is sometimes confusing. Neither does it help when the issue at hand is emotive.

So, basically…he whined and tried to get others to do it for him. That’s significant effort?

2. Total BS, no police or courts have been involved.

Correct. But someone over at Catallarchy had brought it up as a comment on anti-scalping laws in general. Sorry if there was any confusion.

3. Ebay was conducting an illegal auction for tickets whose contract specified that they were nontransferable. In no way is it an innocent third party; it was making money off of enabling contract evasion.

I don’t accept the idea that a third party can be bound by the terms of a contract to which it was not a party. If the organizers of Live-8 want to cancel the tickets or find out who sold them and seek whatever paltry damages might be necessary to compensate them, I have no objection. But their contract places no obligations on eBay.

I would address the economic aspects of your remark as well, but really, it would take enough time on each paragraph of your reply to make this a never-ending task.

That’s convenient. Maybe you can use the time you’re saving to find out what a prisoner’s dilemma is.

I see no evidence that you or others have even considered the arguments that Henry and John were making about the economic effects of marketing the tickets not only on this concert, but on future concerts.

Then you’re not looking very hard. In the comment to which you were replying, I pointed out two serious flaws present in both their arguments, and I said that I agreed with Dr. Quiggin on the effects of resale on future raffle participation.

Jack (29):
First of all almost all vendors of tickets disagree about the desirability of aftermarkets and auctions, even the ones aiming at profit maximisation, so you are bucking the market in revenue maximisation ideas.

That’s true, but what they object to is probably not so much scalping for profit, but rather scalping to recoup losses. I buy a ticket specifically for the purpose of reselling it, how does that hurt the vendor? I take away one of their customers, but only by becoming a customer myself. What hurts them is if I intended to go to the game but then decide not to, and sell the ticket to someone else who would otherwise have bought another ticket. Then they have a net loss of one customer.

As for auctions or other forms of appropriate pricing, there’s a pernicious idea in our culture that “price gouging” is immoral. The most likely explanation for why ticket vendors don’t do this is that they fear some kind of backlash. If this idea were to die a much-deserved death, I think we’d see more rational pricing schemes.

I see some libertarians have misunderstood the motives of the organizers. Some people think the point of the concert is raise money. Under this assumption, it would have been better to sell the tickets for more money. However raising money is not the point of the concert according to the live 8 site. It’s to “raise awareness”, and although I don’t have an opinion on whether or not allowing resale would help or hurt “awareness”, clearly the Live 8 organizers think it would hurt.

I do want to note that in clamping down on resellers, they’re doing a great job of raising awareness. Brouhaha! Free publicity! Some people are saying they should have done more to prevent resale. Pictures or names on the tickets. But that’s expensive, plus, it would have cut off this teacup tempest. Why not take the free publicity?

It’s worth noting that the issues of resaleability and raising money are independent; Live 8 could have chosen to auction tickets and allow resale, or not; either way they’d have raised much more money from the ticket sales.

I found one article with that quote, and it contains only that fragment. It also contains a quote from Geldof on Sky News
“In another interview with Sky News, Geldof said: “What I would ask you to do tonight is to get on eBay and mess up the system.””

Geldof actually said
“”What I would ask you to do tonight is to get on eBay and mess up the system,” he told Sky News.”Everyone should go on and pretend they have got tickets for Live 8 … otherwise go on and bid ridiculous amounts of money for the tickets already on the site,” said the feisty Irish rocker.””

When you see the context for the second quote, you can tell that he’s calling for the ticket auctions to be targetted, not the site in general. The same may well be true of the first quote.

The quote is: “If there are any hackers out there, I would say they should get in there…”, though most media outlets did concentrate on the fake bid side of things.

BTW, nitpicking over what Darren did or did not say is best left to Darren; that’ll teach me to try and clarify a point made by someone other than me.