alt Hacker NewsScalping exists because the sales price is significantly lower than the market value. Just do a Vickery auction and scalping is gone. Because it's avickery auction the price likely wouldn't be totally ludicrous either. If there is a batch of 10,000 units sold the price would be the 10,001th highest bid.
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In Valve’s, they’re raffling the opportunity to make a purchase. For a generalized Vickery auction, it’s assumed the buyer will complete the bid, but that’s not so in valve’s case. What’s a good solution when there is a significant % of bids that do not complete the purchase?
If the price is not totally ludicrous then the scalpers outbid pretty much everyone else. If you know MSRP, then normal people bid MSRP whereas scalpers take a million dollar loan and bid all 10,000 units at double MSRP, then sell at triple/quadruple MSRP. If you don't know MSRP, then most people won't know how much to bid, and won't bid at all, leaving just scalpers.
You've proposed that N times already.
Brands could do that - or an approximation of that by having an higher launch prize for the initial batch - yet they mostly don't.
Maybe the intent here is not keeping difference to themselves, and there's more brand value in not profiting from supply constraints, while being perceived as doing something about mass scalping.
Since most brands don't seem to agree with you, and if you just feel like you should be able to use your extra money to get lucky, you can still try to convince one of the lucky ones. I guess the few who might take it to eBay will charge even more for the privilege.
Not everything needs to be about efficient markets.