Korean pop sensations BTS are coming to London in October, which means the Undercover Economist spent a morning recently with multiple browser tabs open, trying in vain to secure tickets from a variety of websites that were claiming to sell them. Grey-market tickets of unknown provenance are now available at high prices.
The struggle for BTS tickets is hardly unique. The World Cup is coming up, and then there’s Wimbledon, and don’t even get me started on Hamilton.
Economists have had a solution to such frustrations for so long that it is becoming our cliché. The problem is that a limited supply of BTS tickets is priced too cheaply relative to demand. Auctioning off the tickets to the highest bidders would fix that problem, and all but eliminate touts and scalpers: if true BTS fans have already submitted their highest bids in the auction, there is little profit left for re-sellers.
Of course, some people find auctions distasteful, and BTS may not want to be tainted by that. But leaving such qualms aside, the auction design problem itself is more intriguing than it might appear.
What seems at first to be a single commodity — concert tickets — is actually a cluster of related products. Standing, seated, on Wednesday, on Thursday, far back, close up, two tickets for the diehard fans among us or five for the whole family — different combinations of these products might have appealed, depending on their absolute prices and their prices relative to each other. And BTS might have been willing to perform an extra show on the Tuesday, too, if there was enough demand.
Elizabeth Baldwin and Paul Klemperer, economists at Oxford university, have designed auction software that can easily accommodate such complexity. I could have submitted a bid for tickets along the lines of: “Five tickets at up to £50, or two tickets at up to £100, an extra £5 if it’s Thursday rather than Wednesday and up to £20 a head more for the VIP package.”
Looking at hundreds of thousands of such bids, aggregated by a computer, BTS could sell tickets to the keenest bidders, but could also adjust the mix on offer by installing some seats in an area previously reserved for standing, or arranging an extra tour date. It could easily allow favourable terms for fans with proven loyalty.
A more important (and likely) use of such a “product mix” auction would be a treasury raising money from the bond markets. How much money might be borrowed, and at what maturities, would depend on the demand. It is more efficient to combine several separate bond auctions into a single process.
The Bank of England has used “product mix auctions” to inject liquidity into the banking system. They could be used in most situations where a range of similar goods might be bought or sold in different mixes, depending on relative prices.
I confess to having a soft spot for auctions; I wrote a thesis on the subject two decades ago, and Prof Klemperer was my supervisor. But even I hesitate at the radicalism of some economists — such as Eric Posner and Glen Weyl, authors of a new book, Radical Markets. (UK) (US)
One of several eye-catching ideas in the book is, in effect, that everyone’s big possessions — your car, your house — should be up for auction all the time. I would put a price on my car — say, £5,000. It would go into a searchable public register, and if you thought the price was attractive, you could buy it. Having named the price, I would have no right to refuse.
If my car had a sentimental value, I could put a higher price on it to ensure that I kept it. (£5,000 is several times its value already.) But I would hesitate to name a crazy price like £5m, because under Messrs Posner and Weyl’s system, my taxes would be determined by the self-declared value of my assets.
This system has enormous potential — simple, fair, progressive taxes and a more dynamic economy. It would be much easier to develop new infrastructure, build new homes, buy your neighbour’s garden, and pour concrete all over twee villages to build monorails or airport runways.
I once tried to buy a scrap of underused backyard in Hackney. The owner agreed a price, then on reflection, tripled it, and the deal fell through. Neither of us will ever know whether a good trade was scuppered by our posturing.
Under Messrs Posner and Weyl’s system, such questions would not arise: mutually beneficial trades would not be derailed. And compulsory purchase would no longer be a piece of contested bureaucratic coercion: homeowners would name their price (and thus their tax bill) and the developers of Heathrow airport, the Hyperloop, or the latest stunt skyscraper would decide whether or not to pay it.
Not everyone would see these as advantages; I do. But the idea of posting a public selling price for all my property makes even an auction fan like me a little squeamish.
It is not necessary to go so far to ensure a more dynamic economy. Before we consider an auction for villages, kidneys, immigration visas, or my garden shed, I hope that we will at least get round to auctioning off tickets to see BTS.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 8 June 2018.
My book “Messy: How To Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World” is now available in paperback both in the US and the UK – or through your local bookshop.