Any extra Tickets?

So you didn't bother buying tickets for today's sold-out Harvard-Yale game in advance? And you'd really like to go? And you'd like to bring your parents, too? You got 60 bucks?

Ticket prices for this year's game are set by the Athletic Department at $4 for students, $8 for general admission. The prices set by secondhand purveyors of ducats are considerably more variable.

Ticket scalping at a price above face value is an illegal practice; Dave Matthews, director of sports information, says he is aware of the existence of scalpers and that they are "frowned upon." But they are there, and they flout University regulations--and often the norms of human decency--openly and with elan.

One group of Kirkland House juniors ran a call-in auction for a pair of choice seats. "Call in Your Bid," read the signs which they put up all around the University. And there was no dearth of callers, either.

"We got 20 calls for two days straight," one of the students says. "There seems to have been a big demand."

The pair finally went for $50. The junior who bought them has what his roommate calls "friends on the football team--they'll give him better seats, and he'll make a 300 per cent profit on his own tickets."

Abuses, abuses.

A Quincy House junior who also went the poster-advertising route in seeking tickets to the contest gave up on the idea of face-value passes far in advance. "Will pay up to $50 for 3 adjacent seats," his widely distributed sign read.

The student says he received "lots of calls, only because I advertised $50."

Some of the calls were from people who misrepresented their seat locations, or tried to feign ignorance of gate numbers and the like to unload lousy tickets on him. "They assumed I didn't know anything," he says.

He finally bought the tickets from "some Winthrop House seniors"--for the full $50 he offered in his advertisements.

It was a situation right out of Ec 10. A secondary market was in operation, but because of imperfections in information exchange--or something like that--buyers and sellers were having trouble coming together in the marketplace to attain an equilibrium price. And judging by most of the prices being asked, it was a seller's market.

Matthews says that despite the illegality of scalping, "there's really nothing we can do about it. I think everybody just wants to get into the ballpark somehow."

If you think the milk of human kindness curdles entirely on Harvard-Yale weekend, you're not entirely right. Many students caught with extra tickets are still selling them at the price they paid for them.