Ticket resale, bots, and the fair price ticketing curse

The fair price ticketing curse occurs when an event organizer sells tickets at prices that do not correspond to underlying demand conditions and does not want resellers to profit from resale opportunities. The curse has been exacerbated with the advent of online ticketing. The challenge is to facilitate genuine ticket exchange while eliminating resale for profit. None of the attempted public or private solutions solve the problem. We propose a simple mechanism, identify a key set of necessary conditions for it to work, and discuss recent technological innovations that facilitate its implementation.

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