I Hate Online Waiting Rooms: Using Lotteries to Make Event Ticket Sales Fairer in South Africa

A couple of weeks ago the Clicks Beauty Playground tickets went live on AirDosh. My friend asked me to get her a ticket. I thought it was going to be a simple process, log in, select ticket and pay. Instead, I spent three hours stuck in a waiting room during my lunch break. They were about 30,000 people ahead of me and, unsurprisingly, I didn't end up getting the ticket. This experience made me question whether waiting rooms were the most efficient and fairest way to sell tickets to events in which demand exceeds the number of tickets available. In my view, waiting rooms are inherently unfair when it comes to these events within the context of South Africa as they can reinforce already existing inequalities. In this post I suggest that random lotteries are the better option in terms of fairness since they give everyone a chance to win. How Do Waiting Rooms Work? Waiting rooms are basically virtual lines that you need to stand in until you reach the front. You can imagine them like…