On the Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics of Olympic ticket sales

I am watching with some fascination the emerging story of the 2012 London Olympics ticketing approach - from a strictly game theory point of view, you understand

The background is the following - UK citizens, especially Londoners, are subsidizing these games to an amount far greater than the officially admitted of £3bn (original estimate £700m....)

They have been allowed to apply for c 3m tickets as a first tranche, using a rather curious lottery system. In essence, 1.9m people sent in c 19m bids for these tickets. You had to bid at once, for everything you wanted, hence the overbidding. The outcome was also rather curious - 700,000 people got about 4 tickets each, 1.2m people got nothing.

LOCOG, the Olympic society, claims that this was the fairest approach, and is trumpeting an "average" of merely 4 tickets per applicant. It isn't of course, as only about 33% got any at all. The "average" is actually more like 1.5 tickets per person, the "mode" is zero, the "median" is none, and the distribution is thus very highly probably a power distribution with the rich getting richer etc etc.

The winning game theory of the lottery thus becomes clear - those that can afford to risk a large bet were going to win, those millions of less wealthy souls who cautiously bid for what they wanted were far more likely to get nothing.

LOCOG claim this isn't the case (but so far have refused to show the actual allocation distribution, just a very vague non-sensical description*), but I'm buggered if I know how a theoretically random lottery would give me any other outcome. And it it was filtered, why not maximise by number of applicants?

And Unbeknown to UK people, at the same time tickets were being sold normally in Germany and other countries at the same time. So clearly an auction was not the only, nor even optimal, approach to actually selling tickets.

If this sounds odd to you, it also sounds odd to many applicants. Despite reassuring noises from LOCOG that the demand was unpredictably large (wtf? Country of 60m people, one Olympics per generation....) and no other system would be fairer, and the MSM being roped in to bland things over, a rather large rat is being smelled..... It also appears that that the number of tickets on sale to joe public for key events (like the opening) were pitifully small, since much of those have been given to vested interests, (aka "sponsors"), as opposed to the citizen taxpayers funding the olympics (aka "suckers")

Anyway, a "second opportunity" has appeared to buy tickets in a weeks time, mainly of the football tournament and expensive tickets for some other sports, which no-one wanted in the first round - with "priority" being given to first round applicants. It's at 6am on 24 June on a first come, first served basis. The whiff of another rat is starting to permeate the air.....

As a game theorist, I stand back in admiration at the design of the lottery system to maximise rewards for the touts well to do (I await the tickets on eBay at 10+ x face value**) , and the subsequent creation of a panic demand for the less popular stuff.

As a London citizen who will have extra taxes for the next N years to pay all this off, it really p*sses me off. And no, no-one I know got any tickets.

*"Eighty percent of applicants applied for between one and five sessions, with just 5% applying for more than five and "a fraction of 1%" applying for the maximum of 20." Thus by by my calculation 15% of applicants applied for none? FTW?

**They allegedly cannot be sold on eBay et al. We shall see how the 'Net routes around that....