Responding to the news that two ticket touts who made millions of pounds from reselling pop concert seats at inflated prices are facing jail today, the IEA’s Head of Education, Dr Stephen Davies, said the men’s use of deception to buy hundreds of tickets was rightly judged illegal. But, otherwise, he argued that ticket touts perform a vital economic function.

He said: “They are brokers essentially, middlemen, and they have been around for hundreds of years. What they do is to ensure the goods in question, in this case tickets, end up in the hands of the people who want them most and are prepared to pay the highest price for them. This is in economic terms a market efficient outcome. Nobody is actually forced with a proverbial or metaphorical gun to their head to pay £7,000 for an Ed Sheeran ticket.”

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