Reader Mark Stratton sent me this Yahoo! article about the recent brouhaha about high-priced Hannah Montana tickets on the secondary ticket market. The third paragraph gets right to the heart of the matter:
"The more fundamental issue is that promoters of the Hannah Montana series apparently haven't priced tickets commensurate with demand, opening the door to a secondary market with much higher prices," the Fed said.
Here is the article from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond quoted in the Yahoo! article.
As I noted in this post from awhile back, there are some acts who really understand their markets. Scalpers have few inefficiencies to exploit in these instances.
The Fed article does discuss something of interest that those trying to get hot tickets know all too well: scalpers are using technology to essentially cut in line in virtual ticket queues. This is something that involves IT and legal issues that I cannot comment on at this time. But the Fed article gives some market-based recommendations on what might be done to minimize the impact of virtual line-cutting.