[dragonwriter]

> But imagine if you bought one of the last few bottles in the shop, and then went and dumped it on the ground. It's totally legal, but I don't think many would argue it's good conduct.

OTOH, wine shops don't generally offer deals where it is cheaper to by two bottles of wine than one by itself, and prohibit you from reselling (or even giving away) the bottle of wine you don't want.

If they did, lots of people would probably see the seller's conduct as bad conduct, and it might make people more likely to see the buy-two-and-dump-one conduct as, if not good, at least reasonable given the circumstances created by the seller.

[TeMPOraL]

> and prohibit you from reselling (or even giving away) the bottle of wine you don't want.

I think the airlines, as opposed to wine sellers, have a good reason for having tickets to be non-transferable - seats on a plane are a scarce resource. Compare with a similar area where access to a scarce resource is transferable - cultural events like sports games, concerts, etc. What happens there is that there's a whole industry of people who buy out all the tickets and then resell them at higher price, often hoarding until last minute to justify the markup. This kind of antisocial behaviour is quite common and a big problem.

[mikeash]

In what way are airline seats scarce but wine is not?

Stuff like concerts is subject to scalping because the tickets get sold at below market value to avoid pissing people off. A concert venue may well sell out a popular show at $5,000 per ticket, but they won't charge that much because people will be angry. There is nothing like that going on in the airline (or wine) world.