The Toronto Blue Jays take on the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series at Toronto's Rogers Center in October, 2025.Cole Burston/Getty Images
David Clement is the North American Affairs Manager with the Consumer Choice Center.
During the Toronto Blue Jay’s World Series run one theme that emerged was the price of tickets, especially on the resale side of the market. Ticket prices for game 6 and game 7 at the Rogers Centre were eye-watering, with the average resale price coming in just shy of $3,000. And while those prices were for games during a historic run from a team that hadn’t been to a World Series in more than three decades, the upcoming World Cup games in Canada will prove to be another live event where prices will skyrocket.
Now, in response to those pricey baseball tickets, Ontario Premier Doug Ford hinted at potentially re-examining the province’s repealed law that caps the price of tickets, going so far as to say that resellers were “gouging” Blue Jays fans. Quebec, too, is looking to clamp down on resales with Bill 10, which was tabled in December of 2025.
While capping resale prices might sound like a fix, the evidence shows that such a move does a lot more harm than good for cosumers. First and foremost is that doing so further monopolizes the market for ticket sales, because 80 per cent of all major venues sell through Live Nation/Ticketmaster. This would result in higher primary ticket prices and worse service, because the company is further empowered to do whatever it wants.
According to the Progressive Policy Institute, a U.S. public policy think tank, “legislation to cap resale ticket prices and fees targets the only market with competition, leaving the monopolized and broken primary ticket market to operate unfettered.” Keep in mind here that Live Nation just settled with the U.S. Department of Justice for US$200-million in damages in response to antitrust allegations. It was a tiny bit of progress in the fight against Live Nation’s dominance, and a resale price cap sets that back.
U.S. Justice Department and Live Nation reach settlement in antitrust case involving Ticketmaster
More importantly, a cap on the price of resold tickets is incredibly hard to enforce, and drives sales from regulated platforms with security and entrance guarantees to unregulated platforms that are ripe for fraud. The U.S. Government Accountability Office investigated and found that price caps on resales pushed consumers to unregulated markets with high fraud risk.
Just how much higher is the fraud risk in markets where prices are capped?
A comparative study looking at ticket resale practices in Australia, Ireland and Britain – where no price cap exists – showed that the rate of fraud for tickets in Britain was four times lower than in the other two countries, which have caps.
Ireland’s 2021 price cap law failed to prevent fraud, so much so that fraud rates for concerts were reported at 14.1 per cent, and 10.7 per cent for sporting events. That same study found that when price caps were in place, those looking to buy or resell tickets simply shifted to unregulated platforms on social media, like Facebook Marketplace, which do not offer consumer guarantees.
This is exactly what happened in Australia during Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, where more than $250,000 was lost in ticket scams by fans seeking tickets on unregulated platforms. The issue also hit the summer Olympics in France as well, where the games’ face-value price cap created a surge of Olympic scams.
But beyond fraud, there is also an economic argument against capping the resale price. Research from the Centre for Economic and Business Research (CEBR) in Britain estimated that a face-value ticket price cap would ultimately cost the economy £183-million ($333-million) in lost economic activity with an estimate that 25 per cent of potential resellers wouldn’t resell in a capped environment, with many of those ticket holders not attending at all. Empty seats aren’t just a waste in terms of those in the audience, it’s also foregone revenue for concessions, travel, and hotels.
The irony here is that this is exactly why Live Nation supports ticket resell caps, because they benefit from it by pricing their competition out of the market. In economic lingo, this is a classic example of “Bootleggers and Baptists,” where a morally framed regulation benefits a cynical commercial interest. During Prohibition, the bootleggers supported the efforts of the prohibitionists because doing so meant that their business model survived, and in many instances thrived. Live Nation supports these laws because they ultimately price competition out of the market entirely, allowing for them to increase their market share.
The reference here to Prohibition is pressing, because those lessons still hold true. When the government moves to ban certain activities, black markets flourish. When it comes to ticket prices, that lesson can not be forgotten.