StubHub Test Shows Different Prices for Same Ticket

Nine people tried to buy the same concert ticket on StubHub at the same moment. They were shown eight different prices.

The experiment, conducted by NBC News, centered on a single seat for a Harry Styles concert at Madison Square Garden on Oct. 30. The price of that seat could be $455 for one buyer or $517 for another. The base price set by the ticket’s seller was identical for everyone; the entire difference came from the fees StubHub added, which ranged from $72 to $134.

StubHub, one of the largest online ticket resale platforms, said the variation reflects routine testing rather than personalization. The findings nonetheless add to mounting scrutiny of how online marketplaces set the prices consumers actually pay.

How the Prices Diverged

NBC News assembled nine volunteers who checked the same StubHub listing simultaneously. The seller’s asking price was the same across the board, but the platform’s fees were not. One buyer was charged $72 in fees; another was charged nearly twice that amount.

The gap narrowed sharply when the volunteers used their browsers in incognito mode — a private session that discards cookies, saved logins and site storage. In that setup, the spread between the highest and lowest price fell to $19. When the volunteers checked StubHub’s phone app without logging in, almost everyone saw the same price, with a single exception who would have been charged $3 more.

That pattern — differing prices tied to logged-in sessions, converging in private ones — is central to the debate over whether platforms use a shopper’s data to decide what to charge.

StubHub’s Response

In a statement to NBC News, StubHub said it “regularly runs randomized tests on pricing — a standard e-commerce practice across retail and marketplace platforms,” and that the fee variations observed in the experiment reflected that testing “not personalization based on individual user data.”

The company characterized the smaller differences seen in incognito mode as the “natural randomness of a small sample, not a signal that cookie or browsing data drives fee differences.” StubHub said it does not use personal information in setting prices but confirmed that ticket prices can vary.

A Company Under Scrutiny

The experiment lands amid a broader reckoning over StubHub’s business practices. The company recently agreed to pay a $10 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over allegations that it concealed the true, all-in cost of tickets during a three-day window in May 2025. According to Sportico, the FTC’s complaint alleged that StubHub delayed full compliance with the agency’s fees rule to take advantage of the NFL schedule release, which the company’s own memo described as a “99th percentile traffic event.” StubHub denied wrongdoing but agreed to refund a portion of buyers’ fees. The settlement is subject to court approval.

The company has also drawn attention for listings that did not correspond to real inventory.

The Bigger Picture: Dynamic and Personalized Pricing

The days of a single, transparent price tag are fading. In the digital era, prices can shift by the minute without warning. Companies run “price experiments,” showing shoppers a range of prices to identify the most profitable level. More advanced is “surveillance” or personalized pricing, which tailors a price to an individual based on their data.

Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative and author of “Gouged: The End of a Fair Price — and What That Means for Your Wallet,” said price experiments help companies find the upper limit of what customers will pay. Even if the variation is random, she argued, it is unfair.

“It’s not the resale ticket holder who’s getting that money,” Owens told NBC News. “It’s StubHub, who’s just charging some parents more, some ticket holders more, concertgoers more, just to see their favorite show.”

She noted it was telling that when volunteers stripped away their data trails in incognito mode, the platform appeared to have a harder time differentiating prices.

Owens pointed to other industries facing similar questions. In December 2025, her organization joined Consumer Reports and More Perfect Union in an investigation that found some Instacart shoppers were shown different prices for identical grocery items. According to the Groundwork Collaborative, the analysis of live shopping data from more than 400 shoppers across four U.S. cities found that nearly three-quarters of tested grocery items showed different prices to different shoppers, with some carrying up to five price points at once — variations that could cost a family of four about $1,200 a year. Instacart said the differences resulted from randomized price tests and later ended the program.

The technology that enables this is only becoming more powerful. Bob Hedges, a digital fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, said new algorithms and the explosion of online shopping have made individualized pricing easier than ever. “Even five years ago, the compute power and real-time processing was not adequate to support some of the real-time pricing algorithms in place today,” he told NBC News.

A Patchwork of Rules

There is no federal ban on personalized pricing. Some states have moved to regulate it — New York’s Algorithmic Pricing Disclosure Act, the first of its kind, took effect in November 2025 and requires certain businesses to disclose when an algorithm sets a price using personal data. In August 2026, the FTC proposed a policy that would require companies to disclose their use of personalized pricing, prompting pushback from industry groups.

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank, argued in comments to the FTC that personalized pricing is “not inherently deceptive, unfair, or anticompetitive,” and that the same tools used to charge some consumers more can be used to offer others discounts. It urged the agency to focus enforcement on material deception rather than price differences alone.

For consumers, some experts suggest a practical defense. Mark Tremblay, an economics professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, told NBC News that if the experiments are genuinely random, shoppers can exploit them by comparing prices across different devices and sessions. “As a consumer, you should shop around on different mediums,” he said.

What to Watch

StubHub’s fee variation may ultimately be, as the company insists, the ordinary churn of randomized testing. But the experiment sharpens a question regulators and shoppers are increasingly asking: when two people buy the same thing at the same time, why should the price be different — and should anyone be told when it is?

With the FTC’s proposed disclosure policy still open for debate and at least two dozen states weighing their own rules, the answer is likely to be shaped in the months ahead. In the meantime, the concertgoer checking a ticket price has little way of knowing whether the number on their screen is the same one their neighbor would see.