Sports teams and promoters once treated ticket resale as a nuisance to be stamped out. Today, many treat it as a revenue stream worth owning. The shift is best understood through a simple economic framework: a seller with a fixed number of seats faces fans who value those seats differently depending on when they buy, and each distribution model handles that uncertainty differently. An academic model by researchers Feldman and Cachon, described by Gosia Glinska in a University of Virginia Darden School report, lays out four scenarios that map almost perfectly onto the platforms fans actually use today.
Introduction: The Shifting Sands of Sports Ticket Sales
The core problem for any team is timing. Some fans commit early, before they know how much an event will be worth to them; others wait, arriving closer to game day with a much clearer sense of the experience's value. A seller who prices only for the early crowd risks undervaluing seats for the late, high-intent crowd. A seller who waits risks empty stadiums.
How a team resolves that tension determines everything downstream: who gets in, at what price, and who pockets the difference when demand surges. The Darden report's framing of the Feldman and Cachon model gives us four clean scenarios — last-minute selling, advance sale with no resale, uncontrolled resale, and controlled resale through a platform the seller owns and charges fees on. That last scenario, the report notes, is essentially the modern electronic-ticket model, and it is the one reshaping the industry.
Four Core Models of Ticket Distribution and Resale
The first scenario is last-minute (spot) selling: tickets go on sale only immediately before the event, priced against real-time demand. It is largely a theoretical benchmark — most events involve advance sales — but it isolates the value of waiting. The seller avoids locking in low prices early, though the model, as presented, does not account for early demand or uncertainty, and it works best when demand is certain and capacity is scarce.
The second is advance sale with no resale. The team sells early at fixed or tiered prices to secure revenue and fill seats, but bans any official secondary market, aiming to prevent scalping. The cost is what economists call deadweight loss: fans who bought early but discover they value the ticket less have no legitimate way to pass it to someone who values it more, and the seller cannot benefit from demand that rises after the initial sale.
The third is uncontrolled resale. Tickets are sold in advance and trade freely on secondary platforms the seller does not own. Tickets flow toward fans who will pay the most, but the seller collects nothing from those trades — the markup accrues entirely to brokers and resale platforms.
The fourth is controlled resale, the modern electronic-ticket model: the seller sells in advance and operates, or partners with, the resale platform, charging a fee on every resale. The team captures secondary-market value it would otherwise forfeit, while tickets still move to the fans who value them most.
