The big idea: Slap people who buy scalped tickets
A market-based solution to stop ticket scalping through light battery
The ticketing market is broken. It’s frustratingly common to see sold out events with resale offers at double or triple face value, driven by ticket scalpers and opportunists.
Bands have tried different things to stop this: waitlists to purchase, platforms that stop resale at more than face value, and even legally enforced price caps. None of these are really foolproof, because there’s too much opportunity in the grey market. You can pay someone the capped price in the app then give them $200 cash!
This needs a scalable solution. The answer: if you have a resold ticket, somebody at the door slaps you in the face before you’re allowed to enter the venue.
This is not a stupid idea
Here’s how it works: at purchase, you enter the name of each person who is planning to attend the concert. At the door, your ID is checked. If it doesn’t match, you get slapped. It’s a great idea!
The problem with the ticket market is that prices become fully demand driven after all of the original tickets are sold. If there’s a shortage, some people will be willing to overpay for resales — and that means there’s incentive for scalpers to create or worsen a shortage.
The genius of the slap is that it lowers the relative value of a resold ticket vs. a firsthand ticket. People will assign their own cost to the slap (a “slap coefficient”) that reduces their willingness to pay. For example, say that you value a slap at -$60:
Original ticket price: $100
Scalped ticket price: $140
New willingness to pay: $80, less than the face value
We’ve effectively created a Pigouvian tax1 on the buyer of the resold ticket by bundling it with a slap. The slap system isn’t just about penalizing buyers — the slap changes buyers’ behavior, and thus the behavior of scalpers.
Of course, you’d have to make sure that the slaps are consistent — if someone hires a power slap finalist to deliver the slaps, you might as well just ban resold tickets. The opposite is just as dangerous: a kind venue owner may hold back on their slap to the detriment of the broader slapping program.
One solution is a training program to upskill ticket checkers to provide a consistent slapping level. But in the long run, the most scalable solution would be the development of a slapping machine. This would allow venues to deliver a consistent slap experience, adjusting strength based on market changes to the value of a slap.
You may be asking: “what if you really do resell the ticket at face value?” or “my mom gave me this ticket because she has a cold, surely you won’t slap me?”
No, we will slap you. The goal isn’t just disincentivizing scalpers — we’re disincentivizing buying tickets if you’re not confident you’re going to go. Let someone else buy the ticket if you’re not sure! Give your ticket away for free and let the slap be their payment.
There are some equity concerns, though
There’s sort of a built in equalizer in the slap system. When I was 18, I would have happily taken a slap for a cheap ticket to OK Go. Today, I’d pay the extra to protect my face. While age isn’t the best proxy for income, it’s not the worst one? Willingness to take a slap could scale (imperfectly) with wealth, making the slap system a fuzzy redistributionist force in the market.
But if you’re particularly frail, it does seem a little unfair to slap you just as hard as anyone else. And while I understand the redistributive angle, we wouldn’t want to create a situation where we’re instituting unconscious bias into the system against, for example, the elderly.
One solution: allow individuals to designate a third party to take the slap on their behalf. Presumably these people are roughly as unwilling to be slapped as the original ticket holder and demand a fee roughly commensurate — around $60 in our example.
Unfortunately, we’ve just opened up a loophole
The problem with creating a marketplace for slap recipients is that some people don’t mind getting slapped as much. The power slap world champion has an immense opportunity to take these slaps at $60 a pop. That’s fine on a small scale, but what if the rest of the power slap world gets into the market? Prices would fall from competition.
Getting slapped could become financialized, with devastating consequences. Platforms will sell slap coverage with resold tickets, curating a network of slap-resistant individuals. They’ll hedge market prices with slap futures, locking in their price for a slap ahead of time to avoid overpaying. The slap futures market will start being traded and we’ll see financial derivatives pop up, with rooms of analysts pitching strategy based on ice pack sales data.
We can’t have this — grandma needs to get slapped if she wants to see Bob Dylan.
Official idea rating
2.2/5. This idea might have a few operational and implementation challenges, but there is power in taxing bad behavior at the point of consumption. That said, maybe society isn’t ready for widespread battery at concert venues. Other punishments for buying secondhand tickets could reshape the system — charge resold ticket buyers a higher price for concessions. Public shaming is another option: give resold ticket holders a distinctive wristband that clearly marks them as scalper-enablers.
Whatever the solution, it needs to be done by someone who can reach venues across the country. If you happen to know the head of Ticketmaster’s R&D, maybe give them a gentle nudge to spin up a slap robotics division.
A Pigouvian tax is a tax on activities that generate negative externalities - like how buying from scalpers incentivizes them to buy up all of the tickets for popular shows
Hahah. This is the content we need
Funny but I find concerns about scalping to be baffling. I'm concerned only with 1) what I pay or get paid and 2) what I get or offer for it. No subsequent transactions are any of my concern.