Has the World Cup broken dynamic pricing?

**Will Bain** (0:00)
Right, question for the room then. Live events, what's top of your bucket list? Theatre, film, sport, music?
Anything anybody's queued up for manically, Michelle?

**Michelle Fleury** (0:11)
Well, I've got to say, Oasis was at the top of my bucket list, and I did manage to see them last year at the stadium where the World Cup is playing.

**Will Bain** (0:19)
What about you? You love your concerts.

**Rahul Tandon** (0:20)
Look, for me, and I dream about it all the time, go and see India in a T20 World Cup final. Well, Michelle, I had the chance last year. Tickets were a little expensive. I told my wife, got a look. I thought cricket or divorce. I chose not to get divorced.

**Will Bain** (0:36)
The prices you paid for that, was it a shock? Did you get in at face value?

**Michelle Fleury** (0:42)
I bought it on the secondary market because the initial tickets were too expensive, so I definitely had to wait to the last minute.

**Will Bain** (0:48)
Now, not just on the secondary market, but on the primary market a lot of the time, it is very much a market, isn't it? Because that's because we're very much in the world of dynamic pricing, so where the price goes up and down in theory about demand. So we're going to get into all of that today. What it is, if you've not heard about it before, how it works, why it's controversial, and what impact it's having on the world's biggest sporting event, the FIFA World Cup, that kicks off in just a week's time with Michelle in the United States.
Yes, welcome back to Power Players from Business Daily here on the World Service. I'm Will Bain in the studio in the UK.

**Rahul Tandon** (1:26)
I'm Rahul Tandon also in the studio, a different one from Will in here in the UK.

**Michelle Fleury** (1:29)
And I'm Michelle Fleury in Sportsmad, New York, where everyone is excited for the Knicks.

**Will Bain** (1:36)
Yes, this has been an issue, Michelle, that's been around for ages. It's not new, is it? It's perhaps being used more in entertainment, but actually whether people think they know about this or not, they almost certainly will have used it every day in their daily lives, right, for probably a couple of decades at this point.

**Michelle Fleury** (1:54)
Yeah, I mean, I think people know about it from airlines, from Uber, surcharges during kind of peak hours and stuff like that, and also concerts. But the difference here is that it's being applied to the world's biggest football tournament. And essentially what it means is that when demand is high, ticket prices go up, and when demand falls, ticket prices also fall.
Hence the word dynamic, right? It's not a fixed face value ticket, and they're released in batches often. And that's kind of where you get this sort of technology meets ticket pricing, because it's thanks to kind of, you know, the rise of data and our ability to analyse that, and algorithms to kind of read that data and make sense of it, and kind of alter prices to reflect kind of what is going on in the market in terms of supply and demand at any given moment.

**Will Bain** (2:47)
And Rahul, from that sort of explanation and the way we've kind of set it up, you might think, oh god, the house always kind of wins, a bit like our story on prediction markets last week. But actually, the whole point is, right, that consumers, us, people queuing up for a gig or queuing up for an airline, should get a good deal out of this sometimes as well. There's two sides to it.

**Rahul Tandon** (3:06)
There certainly is. And you do get a good deal sometimes, don't you? If you look at electricity, when you go to pay your bills, when we're not in those peak times, we pay less, don't we? When we go to the gym in off peak times, it goes less as well. Those prices go down. We often do benefit from dynamic pricing.

**Will Bain** (3:23)
And even something like Uber that Michelle's talking about, right? The price for the same journey that you take on Uber could be different depending on what time of day you're going or what the traffic's like. Unfortunately, it's starting to creep into more and more of life, isn't it? It's been incredibly controversial here in the UK for coming into pubs and things like that. And whether people know what the starting price is, Rahul, as well.

**Rahul Tandon** (3:44)
I suppose the thing with it is we think of it as a very new concept, don't we, dynamic pricing? But actually, if you go back to the right of the start of when we were doing business, it was all dynamic pricing, wasn't it? Because we were all bartering. The idea that we have a fixed price…