From The Daily Mail:
Sought-after Olympics tickets are to be put on sale at special booths immediately before the Games start, it was revealed yesterday.
The move seems likely to cause vast queues and there are predictions some fans will camp out for days in the hope of getting to see the best events. Demand for most events has been higher than supply with hundreds of thousands failing to get the tickets they bid for online.
I just don't understand what they're playing at. In these days, with the internet and everything, would it be too difficult to just set up an auction?
There are different models, I don't know which is best:
- they could auction off a limited number each day, so that later bidders have a rough guide as to how much they should bid;
- they could accept each bid at face value (so some people pay much more than others for a ticket to the same event) or they could sell all tickets for the clearing price (i.e. if there are ten thousand tickets, they sell all tickets for the 10,000th highest bid);
- they could allocate seats so that the highest bidders get to sit in the front rows/near the finishing line;
- they could run a Dutch auction, with a starting price of £10,000 a ticket for popular things like men's 100 metres final or women's beach volleyball, and a starting price of £100 for qualifying rounds of the men's rolling-a-pea-with-your-nose 1,500 metres and just see what happens.
- they could have successive rounds of bidding, where you pay £10 to register. If there are more entrants than tickets, you have to pay another £10 to go through to the next round (or forego what you've already paid) until the number of entrants has been whittled down to the number of tickets.
- or some combination of one or more of the above, and so on.
But any of these must be better than this "queuing round the block" nonsense; the only upside of that is that unemployed people can earn themselves a few quid queuing for wealthier people.
Thursday 1 March 2012
Olympic tickets and price rationing
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8 comments:
What you have to remember is that the Olympics is ultimately a socialist/fascist event (look at the complexion of the political parties that want it, or how opening ceremonies resemble the sort of thing that Kim Jong-Il and Ceaucescus had).
It's not about keeping things simple or maximising income - they want things like "access to all" (despite the fact that quite a large proportion of those will simply tout the tickets).
If you or I were organising this, what you'd do is simply stick all the tickets on eBay. eBay deals with something like millions of auctions every day. It can handle high loads of views/sales. It provides tools for sellers, so once the auction is finished, you can extract all the names and addresses of all the buyers and push them off to the printing/fullfillment company.
Now, you could build your own system, but for a one-off computer system it's not worth it. You'll spend so much on building and testing the code, setting up the services and so forth that you'd be better off just paying eBay fees (pretty sure that they do preferential deals for large businesses).
Personally, I can't imagine going to the Olympics to see the 100m final. You'll be queueing for a couple of hours to get there (security and travel problems), a similar time to get out, and what will you see? A 10 second race that Usain Bolt will win* and possibly shave a tiny fraction of a second off the world record.
* Usain Bolt's success is a victory of technique - his trainer worked out how to get a 6'5" man to sprint and as a result, the comparative shortarses like Tyson Gay and Asafa Powell don't stand a chance. Powell ran the fastest 100m last year and was 0.2 seconds off Bolt's world record which is an epoch in sprinting terms.
TS, yes "sticking them on eBay" is another perfectly sensible option, but can this cope with e.g. Dutch auctions of 10,000 tickets? If we want to maximise income, then some people will end up paying more than others. If so, great, job done.
I've pointed this out to DCMS before in respect of concert tickets.
For some reason everyone hates the idea of price rationing for tickets. The excuse is always that price rationing will restrict 'public access'. I don't get it.
I pointed out that I'd quite like to own a Ferrari but I don't go harping on at the government to improve 'public access' to supercars.
The effect is of course to create a secondary market which is plagued with dodgy practices such as naked selling (or selling tickets you don't have).
I did a post about it a while back too.
but can this cope with e.g. Dutch auctions of 10,000 tickets?
They don't do Dutch auctions, but you can quite literally put up an auction with 10,000 items.
The best way to do it would be to take all the high-demand events out and sell them to ticket agencies in an old fashioned "turn up" dutch auction where each buyer has to buy 100 tickets, then they distribute them to elite clients. Then for the regular events, stick them on eBay.
Sl, good post.
TS, actually I asked a daft question.
Of course you can use eBbay for Dutch auctions, you just put all 10,000 tickets up for sale for £1,000 each, you sell a few, wait until people stop buying at that price; then you drop the price to £950, sell a few more, etc etc, rinse and repeat until the last few tickets are sold of for 50p each several months later.
The Stigler has it. It's not about the efficient disposal of tickets at the maximum possible price; it's about theatre, pure and simple(s).
See the proles lining up for our wondrous events! Note their happy shining faces! Wonder as they grip their wallets, hands shaking with excitement!
The BBC and other State organs will love it.
FT, but the media regularly pay(s) tribute to The Great British Queue: Wimbledon, the Harrods sale, Harry Potter fans at premieres (they were there 24 hours in advance, bless 'em), the geeks lining up for the new iPad. It's part of a rich national tradition.
Then there's the occasional "oo-er" moment like the queues of panicking depositors outside Northern Rock branches, they got a lot of coverage as well.
Yep, but this is The Olympics, with a whole world to be shown that we can organise it better than any bunch of foreigner johnnies and our proles are so much more enthusiastic than their proles (don't need bussing in).
Needed: long queues for filming and crowing over by politicians. They won't be able to crow over the traffic chaos as a big plus, will they?
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