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andrewaylettyesterday at 3:42 PM0 repliesview on HN

One might imagine a world, which would have to be populated by non-humans, in which we do price discovery for every transaction. Scalpers wouldn't exist: each batch of goods would be sold via Dutch auction.

I do wonder whether such a scheme might work for console launches — you put in the price you'd be willing to pay a scalper, and the batch you're allocated to is the first batch where the auction price is lower than your bid. Then you pay the auction price for that batch.

Faithlife do something with a converse price discovery function for book digitisation: you enter the amount you're willing to pay for the result, and if N people are willing to pay at least $COST/N, they do the work. No point in scalping that: it's a digital product, the question is availability rather than quantity.

In a world populated by humans, and with a mass-market good with restricted availability, there's a societal pressure to avoid enabling scalpers. Whether you act by yourself running some kind of auction, or by attempting to limit the ability of scalpers to buy in bulk, or by ignoring the pressure (and possibly running your own scalping operation to front-run the third-party scalpers), is up to you.