[mfringel]

A key differentiator is that airline seats are a perishable good.

That is, an empty seat has value until the plane takes off, at which point the value goes to zero. On the flip side, a traveler has an opportunity to be in that seat until the plane takes off, at which point its value is zero. People tend to understand that those values continuously vary with time, and so the price will vary with time.

To contrast, books (in specific) and consumer durables (in general) are not perishable goods. The notable exceptions tend to be time-based; try getting chocolates in the heart-shaped box right before Valentine's Day in the US... and then the day after. Since the value of the book doesn't continuously vary with time over the short-run, people don't expect that the price will vary.

[ccalloway]

Tickets for the theater and for concerts are also generally sold for considerably below the price that the market will bear, with enormous effort put into ineffectively preventing resale, despite the tickets being 'perishable' in your sense.

[colinmhayes]

Tickets generally are dynamically priced. If a ticket has high demand it will instantly sell out and be put up for auction on resale sites.

[ccalloway]

By this definition everything that can be resold is dynamically priced.

The GP was trying to explain why airline tickets, but not consumer goods, are dynamically priced when sold by the original vendors.

[colinmhayes]

Most goods that can be dynamically priced are dynamically priced. The thing is that most goods are not supply constrained. When there is competition and an unlimited supply people will just pretend they have a lower willingness to pay so dynamic pricing doesn't really work.

[ccalloway]

This does explain why Playstations are not dynamically priced, but it fails to explain why concert tickets are not dynamically priced.

[kingbirdy]

Concert tickets _are_ dynamically priced, at least for some events. See Ticketmaster's "Official Platinum"[0] which is a dynamic pricing system for the best seats, I imagine other companies have something similar.

[0]: https://help.ticketmaster.com/s/article/What-are-Official-Pl...

[ghaff]

As I recall from my economics, one of the usual theories is that bands/venues/sports events/service stations in remote locations/etc. don't in the main want to gain the reputation for being the a*holes who will rip you off given the slightest opportunity.

It's at least possibly bad for long-tern business. And in the case of small businesses, the owners may just not want to be that person.

For events, "list prices" are often gotten around by (in addition to ticket brokers being a thing) by various types of VIP seating, extras, and so forth which raise prices to closer to market levels while leaving normal ticket list prices--assuming you can get one.

[verall]

Other comments are also explaining; but in the modern day concert tickets _are_ dynamically priced, with stubhub (owned by) and ticketmaster set up to be the "bad guy".

Popular concerts sell out very fast and are immediately being sold on stubhub. Not all of these tickets sold on stubhub are actual resales by consumers or scalpers, but are typically mass purchases negotiated by ticketmaster ahead of time.

Superfans glued to artist social media will get special promo codes which unlock tickets that are not otherwise available. This makes sense because they are the most likely to spend the difference on merch.