| I don't agree that arbitrage hurts consumers (in most cases.) As I said in my sibling comment, arbitrage hurts producers—but it tends to help consumers. If you assume that a good is finite by definition (e.g. a concert ticket), then arbitrage helps the good reach the people who value it the most. Imagine a world where all concert tickets, no matter where in the stadium they are, cost $60. Imagine that there is no such thing as arbitrage. Obviously, in such a world, the tickets for the best seats will sell out first, since they're the most valuable. But they won't necessarily be well-allocated; they might be sold to people who don't actually care much about where they sit. Now, introduce arbitrage (i.e. scalpers.) Suddenly, the tickets for the good seats, that are worth more than $60, are able to have that information built into their price. Now people who value seeing the concert from the best seats at $120, won't lose out to people who only valued those same seats at $60, but happened to get there first. The people who are willing to pay $120, of course, might just be twice as rich, and therefore have about the same utility calculus as the people willing to spend $60 (i.e. it doesn't matter which of the two get the ticket.) But assuming two people with the same income, the one who is willing to pay more should get the ticket. They're willing to trade more of their happiness for it, so it probably will make them more happy. --- In the case of something like concert tickets, the way to fix this is for the producer themselves to price things at the prices the market will bear, such that they serve the role for the market that scalpers would do otherwise. To soak up all the arbitrage-able value themselves. But in cases that aren't like concert tickets—and consumer electronics certainly qualifies—the "right thing to do" is to just make more of the thing. Scalpers don't exist when a company is relying on unit economics of profit margins for their total profits, and will gladly up supply to meet demand (and will also attempt to predict initial demand, and bring initial supply online so as to meet that as well.) Companies can choose not to do this, of course. Mainly, companies avoid doing this because their profits aren't built around unit economics. Neither Prada bags nor Magic: The Gathering "legendary" cards are produced to meet demand; they're instead produced to be fought over. But if the company does build their profits on unit economics, then that leaves you with two options for why they're 'underproducing': either they have to, because they have a tight logistics pipeline and the product wouldn't be revenue-positive if they made that pipeline "wider" for the sake of higher initial production (as happens with each new iPhone); or they're just doing it to have some of the "cachet" of the collector's items rub off on them. In both cases arbitrage will necessarily happen. In the first case, the company themselves are mostly blameless. In the second, it's entirely the company's "fault" that people are paying $600. Either way, this arbitrage is still helping consumers—at the expense of the company. But when it's done for cachet, it's certainly a "hoist by their own petard" sort of situation: the company are throwing away money they could have made, and letting scalpers pick it up, all for the sake of signalling (advertising) that they're a classy company (which—if people don't already believe this, they're not likely to start just because of one event like this.) --- Mind you, Nintendo is probably in the former category, not the latter. The production run for the Classic NES is probably on a minimal pipeline, designed to not leave Nintendo with any units left over once the buying is done. |