Designing Ticket Markets: Eliciting Preferences over Pricing Mechanisms

Dynamic pricing is becoming increasingly common in concert ticket markets, yet it often provokes public criticism over fairness and accessibility, so much so that recent controversies have led some regulators (CMA, Australian Government, European Commission) to consider bans. In this study, we propose to examine how people evaluate dynamic pricing compared to alternative allocation mechanisms such as lotteries, auctions, and hybrid systems. Using an incentivized experiment with real concert tickets at stake, participants experience different market designs and then compete to enter their most preferred institution for a chance to win a ticket. We aim to uncover which mechanisms people favor and infer what they value most in ticket markets, such as fairness, efficiency, or accessibility, based on their institutional preferences. We also seek to establish whether dynamic pricing leads people to spend more than they originally intended.