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Unpacking the Legality of Event Ticket Resale: A Three-Year ESRC Study

Event tickets and consumer protection in the digital age: a socio-legal investigation.

By lac44 | 01 September 2025

Professor Naomi Creutzfeldt (Kent Law School, University of Kent), Professor Guy Osborn (University of Westminster), and Professor Mark James (Manchester Metropolitan University) have won a three-year Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) grant.

The team will be researching event tickets and the (il)legality of their resale and how to regulate this.

Event tickets are sought after commodities and demand for them often outstrips supply. The result of this is the emergence of a secondary ticket market that negatively impacts on consumers. It inflates the price of the tickets, and the contested legality of the resale places the consumer at a risk of being denied entry to the event. The secondary ticket market is an unregulated space that offers few protections to consumers. The overarching aim of this project is to provide clarity on the legal status of an event ticket so that the secondary market can be regulated effectively in a way that provides appropriate protections to consumers and a fair marketplace. The project will advance socio-legal inquiry of event tickets and contribute to the timely debate with robust empirical insights.

Categories: News public engagement Research Tags: collaboration kent law school law news Professor Naomi Creutzfeldt public engagement research
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