To your last point, I’ve always understood their sentiment to be along the lines of:
- differentially rewarding those customers willing to put in higher levels of effort
- inflating attendees’ sense of the purchase’s value, since they’ve sunk work into acquiring the right to attend/buy
- adding a sense of agency: you “could have” gotten the tickets if you’d just showed up earlier, you have only yourself to blame
- discouraging the sense that the lottery is “rigged” or inundated with scalpers
- for that matter, offering some form of social proof that “other people” (rather than bots) are buying the tickets: taking the amount of time that people take to check out, that sort of thing
- which also offers tangible social proof of the promotion’s desirability: “1,000 people in line around the block” counts for more buzz than “5% chance of being able to spend money on this thing”
- potentially more reliable gauge of the true level of demand, so we can get the right size of venue next time: a lottery rewards trying to game your number of entries, and, depending how it’s constructed, may encourage people to enter on a lark even if they don’t intend to buy
- differentially rewarding those customers willing to put in higher levels of effort
- inflating attendees’ sense of the purchase’s value, since they’ve sunk work into acquiring the right to attend/buy
- adding a sense of agency: you “could have” gotten the tickets if you’d just showed up earlier, you have only yourself to blame
- discouraging the sense that the lottery is “rigged” or inundated with scalpers
- for that matter, offering some form of social proof that “other people” (rather than bots) are buying the tickets: taking the amount of time that people take to check out, that sort of thing
- which also offers tangible social proof of the promotion’s desirability: “1,000 people in line around the block” counts for more buzz than “5% chance of being able to spend money on this thing”
- potentially more reliable gauge of the true level of demand, so we can get the right size of venue next time: a lottery rewards trying to game your number of entries, and, depending how it’s constructed, may encourage people to enter on a lark even if they don’t intend to buy