[kazinator]

Scalpers interfere with the original vendor keeping things affordable. E.g. concert tickets: the same number of seats are filled with or without scalpers, but scalpers just ensure that the tickets are more pricy and the concertgoers are richer people. They are just third parties not affiliated with the venue or the artist who help themselves to some cash, by eroding a margin of affordability that was implicit in the original pricing.

If scalpers took food from a food bank and sold it at close to retail prices, would you still say they are doing a service?

[Vecr]

The solution to scalpers is for the original seller to increase the price of the item to the point where the number of scalped items being sold goes down, but the total sales also don't go down too much. Re-adjust as supply and demand change, of course. I think lots of people who don't understand economics would become upset if you did that in many cases, though. Probably would not work for tickets to an event, because you don't have enough time to adjust. Would probably work for Steam Decks and graphics cards though.

[kazinator]

> The solution to scalpers is for the original seller to increase the price of the item

Maybe they are getting enough value from their customers as it is, and don't want to be dicks.

[potatoz2]

You need a way to deal with the scarcity. Pricing is the default way to do that. If you want to avoid pricing, you need to think through what alternative you’ll use, otherwise pricing happens anyway.

[kbenson]

There's really so much more to it. Secondary market brokers (scalpers) shift risk, smooth out demand, and when you catch the right event at the right time, often offer ticket for less than they were originally purchased for. This happens when an artist adds another day to a venue, increasing supply drastically, or when brokers just misjudge demand (it's always a gamble whether to sell immediately (if things even sold out) or hold until closer to the event when demand might be higher (and ticket might have eventually sold out). Check Stubhub or Ticketmaster's resale pages for events right before the event starts. You might be surprised how cheap you can get tickets right before in some cases.

> If scalpers took food from a food bank and sold it at close to retail prices, would you still say they are doing a service?

Not everything should be a market. I don't think using something that obviously shouldn't be a market, like providing free food to the needy, as a valid case where market behavior if it was applied negatively proves that markets are bad in general for other things that are dissimilar.

I've written about this before. I used to work in that industry. You can see some of what I wrote here[1] (sorry, it's just a search result), and this[2] specifically was what I view as a fairly productive conversation that covered a lot of points that I think are rarely discussed regarding this topic, in case you're interested.

1: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16369818

[kazinator]

Scalpers solve this problem:

"I don't want to be be competing against the rabble in the contest of who is early bird to the worm. I've already beaten them with my social position and income, and therefore that should be the contest (in as many situations as possible and applicable, generally speaking). It turns out that some of the same roustabouts are willing to employ themselves in such a way that, for my benefit, they engage in the time competition, whereby they effectively turn it into a convenient bidding competition. As a bonus, the more patrons there are who pay more, the safer and more orderly the event will be. As if that weren't sufficiently excellent, sometimes the hapless ragamuffins find themselves desperate to liquidate numerous unsold tickets close to the event, whereby I can actually save money."