Shady characters would hang around stadiums offering to buy tickets at a premium or to sell them at an even larger premium. Those shady characters are still there, but you can also look up big-ticket brokers on the Web, call their 800 numbers, and comfortably conduct your transaction from home or office. It also means that everyone who has bought a ticket at the box office knows that the true cost of going to the show is not the sum he actually paid but the much larger sum he could make by reselling that ticket. Still, the technology would not be as effective as it is were it not for a favorable ideological climate. And given modern communications technology, New Yorkers need not physically visit New Jersey to do an end run around the local regulations.
Box offices do fight back.
A couple years ago Madison Square Garden, discovering that many of its season ticket holders were reselling them to brokers, revoked thousands of tickets in a stroke. And the people spending weeks in line to see The Phantom Menace are, as far as anyone knows, genuine fanatics rather than hirelings. Still, it is hard to escape the feeling that these are rear-guard actions. To my mind, at least, there is a sort of family resemblance between the phenomenon of ticket scalping and the problem of hot-money flows in the world economy. In both cases there is some efficiency case to be made in their favor.