Tag Archives: Supply and Demand

Economics: Supply and Deman – Twins Style

So, yeah, the Twins have been horrible since the start of the season.  Some of that has to do with some guys getting hurt, to be sure, but I think most of it has to do with not having very many good players.

However, as fate would have it, the Twins play in a  horrible division of baseball and are only 6 games out of 1st.

The Twins think they’re “in it”.

And so too, it seems, do the fans:

The defending American League Central champs struggled out of the gate with a mixture of poor play and injuries. Throw in some inclement weather and it was the “perfect storm” according to Michael Nowakowski, one of the owners of Ticket King, an online ticket broker. A representative from StubHub agreed, saying brokers were “giving away 400 to 500 tickets a game.”

As he negotiated a deal Thursday, one scalper said he was selling $60 tickets for $5 early in the season. “There was an abundance of tickets on the street. It was bad,” he said. But scalpers were getting as much as $35 more than face value per ticket for the first game following the All-Star break.

In a market that’s widely seen as free, the street, literally, is determining the value of a Twins game.

Fascinating.

An interesting side note:  Notice that in each case, the two parties that exchanged goods–one money for tickets, the other tickets for money–walked away feeling “richer” than they did when they met.  One party was able to ttrade some amount of cash for something that meant more to them; a baseball game.  The other party was able to trade a baseball game for something that meant more to them; cash.

This is the text book example of how trade creates wealth.