When speculators don’t screw up, one fewer part being sold now means one more part that can be bought later. Delaying sales of some parts makes the shortage worse earlier and better later. Keeping inventory is a service to people who didn’t plan ahead.

Sometimes people do screw up, buying things that are never used, so they lose money due to the waste. But you can’t assume they’re all screwups.

Airline seats are a better comparison. Airlines keep raising prices as inventory gets sold and flights near. However, that approach means they generally fly with significant unused excess capacity. The reverse approach where prices got cheaper as the flight neared would result in increased occupancy though significantly less total revenue.

The discrepancy shows up because buyers may be willing to pay radically different prices. A business traveler may be willing to book a last minute seat at 3x the price a holiday traveler who’s booking 6 months in advance. Hypothetically, making a 50/50 bet on a 3x sale is clearly a good idea but it means 50% of the time that seat sits unused.

In fact, the whole "lets not sell our inventory, we'll make higher profits!" idea here is suspect. The idea that having unsold inventory in the model is a good idea is just false; having inventory left over is always undesirable. If it was sold at the last minute then they would have more profits. The scalpers are incentivised to minimise leftover inventory to the point where it isn't going to be a big deal.

[0] https://www.travelperk.com/blog/overbooking-airlines-quick-g...

Pre pandemic to get a normal picture: https://www.airlineratings.com/news/packed-planes-new-normal...

Low cost US carriers have a load factor of 90% that’s a trade off between fixed aircraft size and variable demand. However, US carriers only average a load factor of 86.5% meaning legacy carriers like American Airlines have a below 86.5% capacity factor and that difference between 90% and ~85% is exactly the optimization I am talking about.

85% capacity use of an asset is really quite high. If they managed to achieve mid-high 90s that would be startling given how good humans are at missing flights and changing plans.

To repeat myself, if the plan is to leave your capital unutilised for 15% of the time, on purpose, when there is an alternative, then the planner is a lousy capitalist and doomed to soon be a broke one.

No, it’s a difference in business models. Low cost carriers approach things very differently. https://youtu.be/1-uNMj57Y4c

It’s not that their wasting this 15% of their unused seats airlines are simply more profitable with this pricing model.

“While you might expect the airlines to lower their prices a few days before the departure day to occupy the last seats, the opposite is true: Selling 20% of the remaining seats for $1,500 is more profitable than selling half of them for the regular fare of $550.” https://flightfox.com/tradecraft/how-do-airlines-set-prices

Further that’s a statistical average, they might not have any last minute travelers on flight X or they might sell out flight Y 1 hour before departure. As airlines can’t both raise and lower prices at the last minute they A reserve seats for the possibility and B frequency lose the gamble.

The hypothetical in that article would make more money if they sold 80 seats at $495, 15 seats at 900 and then 5 at $1500 (that makes $60,600). There are strong incentives here to fill the seats.

And they are doing the scalpers trick where someone desperate to get on the flight can. As opposed to when the good would be overbought and someone willing to pay $1,500 has to start paying off passengers for their booking instead of giving more money to the people who put planes in the sky.

Plus, if we're both running this strategy, I have huge incentives to offer $1,495 seats to steal your high paying customers off you. It just doesn't work as a strategy unless it is already impossible to fill the plane - which is quite likely the case.

If you designate say 75% of your ticks at a lower price of X then some people willing to pay more will just buy at that price. Essentially the trick is to minimize people who are willing to pay more who end up buying cheaper tickets. And it turns out people booking close to the flight are generally willing to pay more. Sure six months out they still sell off up to 75% of tickets at ~100$ raising or lowering prices based on demand so their losses are limited if nobody else buys the ticket the flight is still mostly full. But at that 75% they start the ramp up and they also ramp things up as the flight gets close.

2 weeks out they say all tickets are 200$ even if some of those 75% are unsold. At the last day bump it to 400$. If over 1 month we can ignore seats at 100$ because that’s unchanged. Sell 1,000 seats at 200$, and 500 seats at 400$ and fly with say 1500 empty seats that’s 400,000$ where you would only make 300,000$ if all 3,000 seats where sold for 100$. But what if they dropped prices at the last hour? Well most of the time they have empty seats so many would avoid the 400$ ticket and would tend to wait around for that window especially for flights from A to B leaving every hour. Peak prices are a game of chicken and they can’t blink or they lose billions in revenue.

This is of course heavily simplified but it does demonstrate the basic trick I am talking about where they extract value from unsold inventory.

I can tell you why the airlines would be planning on having empty seats in practice - because there are sometimes literally not enough people interested in travelling to fill the aircraft, so they adopt a strategy of leaving empty seats because they have no other option. If you've ever flown some god-awful connecting flight at 2am you might have seen that in action yourself. But that isn't because the airline is choosing to reserve seats, they'd much rather have more passengers - that just isn't an option.

How and or when exactly to you plan to sell those tickets?

Do it after the price hike and people will just wait.

Do it before and you need to see the future to know how many seats will eventually be sold otherwise you just traded a 400$ ticket for a 100$ ticket. It’s no more a viable option than suggesting it’s easy to win the lottery just pick the correct numbers.

Your strategy has the same problem - you have to predict how many last minute travellers there are too. If you just leave an unnecessary buffer then the strategy fails. The one of us who does a better job of putting exactly 100 bodies in 100 seats - none left over - is going to have a more profitable airline. That is somewhat core to the argument us pedant capitalists make.

It’s just the math works out so on the margin having even slightly better than a 1 in 4 chance of selling at 4x the prices is a net gain. Suppose their reserving 50 seats and have a 26% chance of selling all 50, only a 50% chance of selling 20 or more.

That means on 1/2 of flights their intentionally flying with 30 or more empty seats, but reserving even 49 seats rather than 50 loses them money.

What raises the difficulty is that tickets expire - not a problem with selling electronic parts, though they do eventually become obsolete.

If there's a legitimate demand that will be used, then there's a good case for production to be increased to meet such demand, and all parties who need something would have their needs met.

At no point to scalpers make this system more efficient – they just serve to extract a greater profit from consumers and businesses for their own benefit by the aforementioned artificial scarcity that they make. This is also known as cornering the market, a well-known and despised practice that has been frequently used by morally corrupt individuals who sought only to benefit themselves. Nowhere can nor should the argument be made that scalpers help anyone but themselves.

There's no "artificial" demand. Think about it - the "scalper" isn't going to buy something that they can't sell on, they'd just lose money that way. (Maybe some of them make bad judgements - but they'll naturally go out of business in that case).

> If there's a legitimate demand that will be used, then there's a good case for production to be increased to meet such demand, and all parties who need something would have their needs met.

"Scalpers" improve the quality of that signal and make it easier to increase production with confidence.

> This is also known as cornering the market, a well-known and despised practice

Views on true corners are certainly mixed (there's an argument that it punishes dishonest market makers), but in any case it only applies to buying up the whole supply, which no individual "scalper" does or can.

The only reason they can sell something on is because they created an artificial scarcity of the thing. If widget X has a well-matched supply and demand, and a scalper decides to buy 10% of widget X, then 10% of the demand is now unmet, some of the buyers go out of business, and the maker of widget X now has 90 something % of their previous market.

If that happens, then the price drops, and the "scalper" loses money - demand has some elasticity, and a healthy market has some slack in it. Momentum-trading speculation works sometimes, but anyone who uses it as their sole strategy will go bankrupt sooner or later.

That assumes they have perfect information which they don’t they can only estimate demand. It’s perfectly rational for a scalper to regularly purchase more tickets than they sell due to the kind of markup their looking for. At say 4x they could on average sell 1/2 the tickets while doubling their investment.

And of course that assumes they never run into logistical issues.

2. Who do you think will consistently have better information than someone whose sole goal is to sell these tickets?

3. If they are consistently losing money scalping and not selling tickets they won't be a scalper much longer.

4. This is a dynamic process which can account for changing variables regarding supply and demand quickly as opposed to rules and regulations which do not.

5. If they only sell half the tickets at 4x then they could sell the last half at an extreme discount and make even more than double their investment! Do you think they would rather make more money or less?

Scarcity can drive price upwards in an exponential way that ends up making it optimal to not sell all inventory. Sure in an ideal world you would sell everything you can for the maximum price but in the real world the buyer is incentivized to wait until you offer your minimal price.

True, but in that case they've added more value than they've subtracted. That artists insist on pricing every concert to sell out is a big part of the problem here; you'd get a more functional market by accepting a few empty seats to give some slack.