Ticket touts are 'simply providing a market service', according to a member of a free market think-tank in the UK.
It comes after Fine Gael TD Alan Dillon warned that nobody has been prosecuted for ticket touting in Ireland, two years after the practice was made illegal.
On Newstalk Breakfast this morning, Dr Steve Davies from the London Institute of Economic Affairs dismissed calls for the legislation to be updated - claiming touts are providing a service.
"Essentially ticket touts are simply providing a market service," he said.
"What they're doing is buying up a good at a lower price and then finding people who are voluntarily and willingly prepared to pay a high price for those goods.
"There are many people like this is markets of all kinds, and what they do is they bring supply and demand into balance.
"What you have to realise is they are not the cause of the high prices of the tickets.
"The high price is because there is a very high demand for tickets for some concerts... and a fundamentally fixed supply.
"You can't put extra seats into venues like Croke Park, for example".
'Making a choice'
Dr Davies said there are only two options for customers.
"The actual alternative choice that they have is between paying that very high price, and being certain of getting a ticket, or trying to get the ticket at the face value and having an incredibly small chance," he said.
"So it's a matter of making a choice: either you have a really acute shortage of tickets, and it's a matter of pure luck if you get one, or you have a market price for the tickets which will be much higher than the face value.
"If you can afford to pay it, which is the rub of course, then you'll be certain of getting a ticket".
Pricing options
Dr Davies said artists can take the Ed Sheeran approach, of banning the resale of tickets, or else use dynamic pricing.
"[Dynamic pricing] is what is used by airlines and hotels to allocate rooms and seats," he said.
"Harry Styles and Coldplay have both done that recently; but what that did, in both of their cases, was to more than double the tickets.
"There's no way of avoiding either a shortage or much higher prices - those are the only two realistic options available to you".
Dr Davies said the scenario is the same for any popular commodity.
"If you had shops in Dublin that were selling diamonds at €100 each, and everyone knows that those diamonds will sell at €2,000 each, you'd have an enormous queue outside the shop," he said.
"A lot of the people who buy them would then sell them on, and it's exactly the same with valuable things like tickets to a Taylor Swift concert," he added.
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