Designing Fair Ticket Markets: Eliciting Preferences Over PricingMechanisms

This paper examines individuals’ preferences over different concert ticket allo-cation institutions, how they trade within these systems, and what people value in ticketmarkets. Using an incentivized experiment with real concert tickets, participants experi-enced various institutions and competed for a chance to win a ticket. We find that theHybrid Mechanism, a combination of a lottery and uniform price auction, is the most pre-ferred overall. While the Uniform Price Auction is perceived as the most efficient, DynamicPricing is perceived as the least fair. In terms of market outcomes, the uniform price auc-tion generates the highest revenue and is the most efficient, but also results in substantialoverbidding, diminishing potential efficiency, and consumer surplus. Participants sort intoinstitutions according to their willingness to pay: those with higher valuations tend to grav-itate toward auction institutions and those with lower valuations prefer random allocationmechanisms like the lottery.