Imagine going down to your local car dealership to buy a new truck. You drive it for a couple months

Ticketmaster has been engaged in a national effort to change state laws so that fans in some states would be forced to buy paperless tickets to concerts and sporting events. In the case that you get sick or can t attend the event for another reason, you then have to re-sell your tickets on a secondary market controlled by guess who . Ticketmaster or their designated agents! In effect, Ticketmaster would then own, from start to finish, the tickets to see games, concerts or other events they control, as Jim Hart points out in a recent Tallahassee Democrat op-ed . To understand why that s objectionable, Jim makes this analogy:
central california travel Imagine going down to your local car dealership to buy a new truck. You drive it for a couple months and decide it’s just not for you. You put an ad in the paper asking for what you consider to be a fair price. But instead of hearing from a fellow consumer, you get a call from the dealership. They tell you there was a law passed that requires you either to sell your truck back to them, at a price they determine, or to sell it through them, with a new set of fees and commissions tacked on. Such a notion defies common sense and certainly free-market principles.
It is unclear to me if the goal of Ticketmaster is to change existing ticket regulations that require central california travel open-market resale of all event tickets, or if they are trying to make open-market resale of all event tickets illegal.
It seems to me that if the venue and ticketer want to coordinate to not allow for open-market resale of the tickets, I don t see the problem. As long as the purchaser is fully informed ahead of time and there is no fraud, a venue owner should be able to make the rules on who visits their private property.
central california travel Quite simply, Ticketmaster would like to make more money on the resale of the ticket. A paperless ticket allows them to maintain control, as you must resell the ticket to, or through central california travel them, rather than on the open market. Where are those anti-monopoly zealots central california travel when you need them?
A privately owned venue or the event producer can, indeed, determine who visits their property, (well, almost) and can determine what the rules are while ticketholders enjoy the event for which you have been granted a license. It s hard to imagine a venue or event producer caring who, exactly, uses a ticket once it has been purchased.
The issue demonstrates one of the more disagreeable central california travel features of representative democracy. Ticketmaster has the incentive central california travel to actively lobby legislatures central california travel to allow them more control of secondary ticket markets. The individuals that purchase those tickets have other things to do.
Dr. Mark J. Perry is a full professor of economics at the Flint campus of The University of Michigan, where he has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in economics and finance since 1996. Starting in the fall of 2009, Perry has also held a joint appointment as a scholar at The American Enterprise Institute. read more
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