There are continued complaints on matters of event ticketing, particularly in music, despite recent changes in legislation and in practice. This report, a development of ideas following from Waterson (2016), sets out a personal view on the market, focusing on the UK and in particular the music sector, as it now exists. In it, I ask and respond to a self-imposed question- what might an improved ticketing system set out to achieve? In my view, a desirable ticketing system would be one that puts consumers first, both in terms of ease, fairness and choice. Hence the title. Currently, many of the participants in the market do not have consumers foremost in mind, and the lesson from various other markets where technology has shown significant potential is that ultimately, a framework that provides what (most) consumers want wins out.
Retail chains essentially practice one of two broad strategies in setting prices across their stores. The more straightforward is to set a chain- or country- wide price. Alternatively, managers of retail chains may customize prices to the store level according to local demand and competitive conditions. For example, a chain may price lower in a location with lower demand and/or more competition. However, despite having the ability to customize prices to local market conditions, some choose instead to commit to uniform pricing with a “one price policy” across their entire store network. As an illustration, we focus on UK supermarket chains. Is there an advantage to be gained from deliberately choosing not to price discriminate across locations? We show generally and illustrate through means of a specific model that there exists a strategic incentive to soften competition in competitive markets by committing not to customize prices at the store level and instead adopt uniform pricing across the store network, and to raise overall profits thereby. Furthermore, we characterize quite precisely the circumstances under which uniform pricing is, and is not, profitable and illustrate that under a range of circumstances uniform pricing may be the preferable strategy.
This paper delivers a significantly different empirical perspective on micro pricing behaviour
and its impact on macroeconomic processes than previous studies, largely resulting from the
fact that our weekly price data for the three major British supermarkets spans a seven year
period including the crisis years 2008-2010. We find that there is a large and significant
change in the behaviour of prices from 2008 onwards: prices change more frequently and the
average duration of price spells declines significantly. Several of our findings run strongly
counter to established empirical regularities, in particular the high overall frequency of
regular or reference price changes we uncover, the greater intensity of change in more
turbulent times and the numerical dominance of price falls over rises. The pricing behaviour
revealed also significantly challenges the implicit assumption that prices are tracking cost
changes.
This note questions the contention in recent work by Mathewson and Winter that resale price maintenance can be mimicked in its effects by other vertical restraints. I argue that territorial restraints may be of little use as a substitute for price restraints, but that they may have other beneficial effects from the manufacturer's viewpoint. Evidence arising from the prohibition of resale price maintenance in the United Kingdom supports the view developed here.
We examine whether the organisation of individual researchers into departments has an impact on the average research quality, beyond the impact of the individuals themselves. Using data on science disciplines generated from the UK Research Assessment Exercises in 1996, 2001 and 2008, we find that department size has an independent positive effect on research quality.
Journal Article Locational Mobility and Welfare Get access Michael Waterson Michael Waterson University of Newcastle upon Tyne Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 95, Issue 379, 1 September 1985, Pages 774–777, https://doi.org/10.2307/2233040 Published: 01 September 1985
This paper studies the impact of a fire in 2006 which removed the possibility of access to the Rough gas storage facilities covering over 80% of total UK storage, at a time when major withdrawals from storage would have likely taken place. Implicitly, it shows the value of such gas storage facilities, in a country with relatively little storage, where we might therefore see a considerable impact. We find that the major effect on activity was through an increased sensitivity of supply to prices and an increased variance in this sensitivity, not through non-price rationing.
In this paper we study whether learning from rivals affects within-market location decisions between competing firms. We show it does, using detailed locational data from two leading hamburger chains in the UK. Using four different tests, we demonstrate that alternative explanations - pre-emption and product differentiation - have less bite than between firm learning.
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