Look who’s scalping now

Recently, two major league baseball teams decided if they couldn’t beat scalpers, they would join them. The Chicago Cubs’ parent company established a corporation with the sole purpose of scalping Cubs tickets. The Seattle Mariners took a different, though similarly nefarious, approach. The team began facilitating the scalping of tickets on its website (where the team could charge a commission on the transactions) even as it hired off-duty police officers to enforce a local antiscalping law on the competition–the good old-fashioned freelance ticket broker…

It remains a puzzle why baseball teams ever prohibited scalping of tickets. Arguably they wanted to prevent their game from becoming seen as the province of the rich, which would have limited TV revenues in the longer run. Clearly the tide is turning toward more scalping and market-clearing prices. Why? Perhaps enough people are wealthy today that the reputational constraints are being relaxed.

Here is the full story, and thanks to Eric Crampton for the pointer.