Sunday, December 17, 2017

High frequency ticket buying, by scalper bots

Freakonomics asks Why Is the Live-Event Ticket Market So Screwed Up?

They talk to a bunch of good economists.  Here's Eric Budish on the subject of why it's odd that tickets are "underpriced," in the sense that it's profitable for software bots to buy them up before the humans can get in the act, and then resell them...

"BUDISH: That’s competition on — to an economist — a strange dimension: competition on speed rather than price; that’s the connection to my stuff on high-frequency trading. It’s competition, but it’s not a productive form of competition."

Read (or listen) to the whole thing at the link.

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