There is, at least, a sound if quaint economic reason for state and federal regulators treading lightly on the secondary market for tickets to high-demand sports and entertainment events.

If you have purchased a ticket and someone wants to pay you a premium to buy it, that’s pretty much how markets work.

It’s not that simple in practice, of course, because ticket brokers often buy up big blocks of tickets and inherently increase their value. The Government Accountability Office found in 2018 that fees alone drive up ticket prices between 27% and 31%.

But, at least, they are actual tickets.

Now, a practice called speculative ticketing even more fundamentally disrupts the market and drives up prices.

Under that practice, brokers post concert or sports tickets for sale even before the concert promoter or team makes the tickets available.

Sellers can’t guarantee that they actually can obtain the tickets. And when multiple would-be sellers engage in the practice at the same time, they fundamentally drive the price upward even before promoters or teams create the tickets — price pressure that then ripples through the actual market.

The ongoing Taylor Swift tour is the poster child for ticketing issues. Fans have paid upwards of 70 times the face value on secondary markets, but many paid that to speculative brokers and never received tickets.

Democratic state Sen. Marty Flynn of Lackawanna County is among a bipartisan group of lawmakers in both houses who plan to file bills to outlaw speculative ticketing. Lawmakers quickly should pass it as a matter of consumer protection.

— Tribune News Service