You've missed my meaning. I said analogous, not literally the same. The scalper changes availability of tickets from favoring time/chance to favoring willingness to pay more.
It's also a bit much to talk about the scalper imposing anything on end users. If everyone got together and stopped buying scalped tickets, there wouldn't be any ticket scalping anymore. Except that won't work because there are plenty of people that care less about money and ticket scalping than they care about attending concerts.
Except that scalpers are also a part of the market. When a large percentage of original purchases are by scalpers, they artificially up the market value.
Scalpers aren't powerful enough to create an artificial scarcity. If there were not really an increased demand for the products, noone would pay their inflated prices. When demand outstrips supply, the logical thing for manufacturers and (e-)retailers to do would be to increase prices themselves to balance out the situation, but for various reasons (one of which is possible negative PR) they are reluctant to do that, so the scalpers profit...
> Demand would be met with an increase in supply, satisfying all needs for the product and without the "help" of scalpers who sidestep supply-and-demand by artificially creating scarcity to drive up demand for their own profit. This is no help to 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.
Uhh what? So the price people are willing to pay dictates the worth, what exactly is your point here then? That scalpers are bad people because they make a profit?
If it's profitable for anyone to resell, that implies the company priced below the market price and there would be a shortage without scalpers. So the company is unable to meet the needs of its customers in any event. Scalpers just make it somewhat more efficient.
Not everyone is scalping, but everyone is buying more for themselves because they're suddenly worried about future supply. There would still be a temporary shortage without the scalpers, maybe slightly less severe.
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