However, there is a hard reality to be faced if demand exceeds supply, and it can’t be escaped. Attempt to escape it and you get things like we saw last year. When there is a gap between what people are prepared to pay, and what people are charged, there is a value to be captured, and people will seek to capture it. They might be scalpers. You might try to give it to lottery winners :-)

But I think the best thing you can do with it is to have the community itself gain from that value. Sell most tickets at market price, and if that exceeds the price needed to cover event expenses, take that money and put it into the community, either by financing more art, or subsidizing tickets for those who can’t afford the market price. If a lottery is the only way you can think of to allocate subsidized tickets, so be it, but apply that only on the 10,000 subsidized tickets, not on the entire body. But you can also do things like let camps subsidize their less wealthy members. Or spend some on improving gate and exodus to the benefit of all, to increasing potty service frequencies, and a few other things. As long as it’s going into the community rather than just into the pockets of owners or scalpers, I doubt there is nearly as much of a problem with market prices as people think.

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Tickets. That one very well might be like the equation x^2 + 2x + 10 = 0. There is no real solution to that quadratic. There are imaginary solutions. So imagine another event somewhere. Something other than dust, like sand, snow, clay, or morning dew. They are happening, they are growing, and you can get a stupid ticket for under $50 in most cases. In my limited experience, you can get out of them exactly what you put in – which can potentially make them more personally amazing than that sold out event.

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Now as for tickets, scarcity messes with ticket sales which make the price go up in a free market (and thats as far as I know in economic theory). But scarcity is fundamentally incompatible with “radical inclusion”. When there’s scarcity, no socioeconomic system works — there are always some who are left with not enough. So with tickets, there’s no such thing as a truly fair way to do things. 2012 brought the lottery which applied “random” to the distribution of tickets which many assumed was an attempt to be “fair”. I wonder if there is a _radical_ solution to ticket sales that amplifies the unfair nature of scarce tickets.

Off the cuff, what would happen if people could bid for tickets in multiples of whole-ticket prices, but any overbid becomes a free ticket for someone else and removed from the set of tickets available for purchase? So if you bid 2x ticket price, you would get one ticket but one more ticket would be free to someone else and not available for purchase.

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The principle is stated:

“Decommodification. In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our
community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by
commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready
to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the
substitution of consumption for participatory experience.”

I love this principle. Commodification ignores and simplifies complex
relations, obscuring origins and narrows things to a single service or
standard unit. Trying to commodify the Burning Man experience would
destroy it. But I don’t think commodification has anything to do with
selling tickets for more than face price.

The wrinkle is that tickets to Burning Man are already goods for sale,
a commercial transaction. The question is if changing the price that
they are being sold for – in effect, creating a market for tickets -
transforms them into a commodity.

Commodification can mean two different things.

In business theory, commodification is a process through which
qualitatively different things are made equivalent and exchangeable
through the medium of money. This can have many insidious effects,
and is something that we strive to avoid at Burning Man. But I can’t
see the connection to charging more for a ticket – transferable tickets
are already fungible goods with a price attached.

In Marxist political theory, commodification describes assignment of
economic value to something not previously considered in economic
terms. Another way of saying this is that commodification is the
process by which something which does not have an economic value is
assigned a value and hence how market values can replace other social
values. It seems like there is an argument here if you are careful to
separate value and price. Earlier this summer Burning Man tickets
were valued by some individuals more than their monetary price. By
restricting the resale price to the face price, you are resisting
creating a market. But now that we are weeks from the burn, tickets
are oversupplied. This has caused tickets to begin selling below the
face value. I have heard zero objections to this, even though it
commodifies the ticket every bit as much as selling for more than face
price.

So in both senses, the ticket is already a commodity. But scalping is
still widely perceived as violating community norms. Why?

I think the real objection is that markets generally deal poorly with
issues of procedural fairness and equitable distribution, and critics
see paying more than face price as producing greater levels of
inequality in power and participation while reinforcing existing
vulnerabilities.

With that in mind, if we want to encourage people not to pay over face
price, lets do it for the right reasons. If the goal is to maintain
equitable distribution, call it radical inclusion. If the goal is to
distribute tickets in a way that you think will best benefit the
community rather than personal profit, call it civic responsibility.
If the goal is to prevent scalpers, call it communal effort.

But don’t call it decommodification.

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But when it comes to tickets, the economics get super-funky. There are two currencies here: money and tickets. We’ve got to distribute both to get people to Burning Man, but not in the same ways nor under the same principles. Can we tease them apart in some way, such that the ticket market supports our goals and discourages scalping?

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