Well ladies and gents, it's that time of year again. Time to dust off your student ticket account and watch your email like a hawk. It's common knowledge that student tickets for men's basketball games are allocated through a lottery. If you request your tickets during the designated window, you have the chance of winning a FREE seat in JPJ watching one of the country's best college basketball teams. But, as Charlottesville native David John Marotta of Forbes would say, we're actually paying a hefty economic rent for these "free" tickets.
In my own personal experience (as only one of thousands of UVA students who are requesting these tickets), the process is anything but simple. The ticket must be requested in a specific window of time, meaning that one has to constantly be on the lookout for emails listing these all-important ticket request windows. The process of requesting a ticket takes no more than five minutes, but think about the thousands of students requesting at once. Even if only 1,000 out of the 16,000 students at this school request a ticket for a given game, 5,000 minutes are being spent in rent-seeking activities!
After the request comes the result of the lottery: either the moment of joy when a ticket is granted or the dreaded moment of dismay when one is not. However, hope is not lost because a couple of days before the game comes another sweet spot to try to request a ticket. This marks the beginning of a fascinating phenomenon through which some foolish souls attempt to return their basketball tickets while others are hungrily waiting to scoop them up. Of course, this entire process depends on sheer luck. The first person to press the request button after a ticket is returned receives the ticket. Some ticket holders will attempt to electronically return their tickets and have a friend request the ticket a split second later in hopes of transferring this ticket to their friend. Unfortunately, their friend is undoubtedly not the only student waiting on the other end of the line, as many students are willing to spend at least 30 minutes clicking the ticket request button over and over again to poach said tickets (I know this from personal experience). Here we have yet another added level of rent-seeking in terms of time spent by both ticket-returners and ticket seekers, adding hundreds if not thousands of minutes to the amount of time spent seeking said tickets.
No matter how fascinating it is to be present at a Virginia basketball game, think twice about the cost of requesting your ticket next time you do so--as well as what this means in terms of the collective rent paid by the student body. Given the amount of rent we are all going to pay to the men's basketball team, let's hope we gain utility from some WINS this year!
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