Ticket pricing under demand uncertainty

This paper studies the case of a monopolist who sells tickets to consumers who learn new information about their demands over time. The monopolist can sell early to uninformed consumers and/or close to the event date to informed ones, or it can ration tickets and allow ticket holders to resell. I show that rationing and intertemporal sales are never optimal. More surprising, the monopolist cannot do strictly better by allowing resale. I discuss the implications of the model for the pricing practices observed in ticket markets.