The Wrong End of the Chain? A Law and Economics Analysis of Smart-Contract Ticketing as an Alternative to Secondary-Market Regulation

Secondary markets for event tickets have generated persistent dysfunctions across European jurisdictions. This thesis identifies four, each rooted in the primary market's deliberate underpricing strategy. These include asymmetric information between primary purchasers and secondary buyers concerning ticket validity and the risk of organizer-side cancellation. They also include substantial rent extraction by professional resellers who capture the gap between face value and consumer willingness to pay, as well as platform-based market power exercised by concentrated resale intermediaries. Finally, distributional and access concerns arise as speculators, whose participation is unrelated to the underlying event, displace the fan audience the organizer sought to reach. These failures share a common structural origin: The rent that a deliberately below-clearing primary price generates renews at each on-sale and cannot be neutralized by regulation of the downstream market alone. France, Italy, the United Kingdom and Germany have each responded with distinct regulatory instruments. Yet each response shares a decisive limitation that this thesis identifies analytically: All operate downstream of the primary-market underpricing that generates the underlying rent and their empirical records accordingly show sustained enforcement coexisting with persistent operational non-compliance. Against this record, the thesis asks whether smart-contract-based ticket issuance, using non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as the underlying technical layer, offers an alternative governance pathway that addresses the dysfunctions at their source. The analysis develops the architectural alternative as an ex ante intervention operating within the organizer's own jurisdictional reach - encoding resale-price ceilings, restricted transfer through authorized channels, and identity-binding at issuance directly into the ticket's technical infrastructure rather than relying on downstream enforcement. Drawing on the distinction between governance through law and governance through code, the thesis argues that architectural intervention addresses each of the four dysfunctions at its structural source rather than at its symptomatic surface.