That adds a lot of overhead (who is responsible for marking attendance? How is the refund managed, especially in the case of cash payments?), opens up new forms of abuse around how you count attendance, but most importantly doesn't prevent scalping from finding an equilibrium above the ability of a demographic to pay, and I am not even convinced it will stop scalpers from finding price points that have profit for them but lower attendances.

I mean, should you need a staff economist to price your concert tickets?

> I mean, should you need a staff economist to price your concert tickets?

If you want to avoid your tickets going to the people who are willing to pay the most for them then yes you're going to need an economist, and even then you will likely fail. (As you should, IMO)

This is easily circumvented because the deposit will simply be priced into the scalped price...

But it will become much harder to hoard lots of tickets. And it will be expensive to not be able to sell them all. It guarantees that all seats (for which a ticket has been sold) are actually filled.