Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to

another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd

love to hear from you. This week's podcast is a little out of the ordinary. I'm out in

California visiting the Hoover Institution and the start of my visit coincided with Major League

Baseball's All-Star game in downtown San Francisco's AT&T Park, the home of the San Francisco

giant. I thought it might be interesting to explore the market for tickets to the game, a rare

bit of fieldwork for an economist. I've always been interested in the market for tickets to concerts

and sporting events, particularly in cases where the events sold out, yet tickets are still available

on the street if you really want to go. Usually, that means paying more than the face value of the

ticket, what's often called scalping. A word like gouging, which has a strong moral implication.

Yet when a ticket changes hands, voluntarily, why do we judge it as an immoral act and sometimes

it's an illegal one? Where's the harm? If I value seeing an event more than you do and you have

the ticket and you sell the ticket to me for more than you paid for it, both of us are better off.

In recent years, a lot of cities have legalized the resale of tickets that are priced above the

face value. Some sports teams have created their own websites to make it easier for ticket holders

to resell their tickets. The existence of websites such as eBay, Stubhub, and Craig's List,

it made it easier to buy and sell tickets, and it made it much harder and, I guess,

sillier to try and stop those transactions on the street. What follows is a set of interviews I

conducted with people outside of AT&T Park a few hours before the All-Store game. Among the people

I'll be talking to are Alex, a scalper I met outside the ballpark last summer when I wanted to

...