A shortage is when demand exceeds supply at a certain price. People want to buy something, but they can't. If Sony is willing to sell its 100 PS5s at $500, and 200 people are willing to buy at that price, you have a shortage, because 100 people will be up a hill. Under the basic market model, the price would be raised until everyone who wants to buy a PS5 at that price gets one. Let's say it's at $800. The same exact thing works in reverse. If Sony is willing to sell its 100 PS5s at $500 but only 50 are willing to buy at that price, you have a surplus. And the model says Sony would lower the price until everyone who can buy a PS5 gets one. And we might see that later on in a generation: people several years down the line are predictably much less willing to pay $500 for the console, so the price might get lowered to $400. Put a pin in that concept. The cost of production of these consoles also happens to go down over time, but that's a separate thing that we can ignore for now.
Shortages and surpluses are generally BAD. They are inefficiencies that markets tend to avoid, but as we can see in this real-world example, not always. Price is an efficient way for producers and consumers to signal their willingness to trade goods, and when there's a breakdown, we get things like wait times. Rationing. Things that, efficiency wise, we would've preferred have just been mitigated by letting a price be fluid.
Now we arrive at scalpers. By realizing there's a shortage, to some degree they are able to gather the products and redistribute them based upon price. That's what we want from an efficiency perspective. People that willing to pay get consoles first, people that are less willing will wait for the console to come down. But even if they are less willing, as long as they are more willing that the original MSRP, they are more likely to get one in a timely and orderly manner than F5ing Walmart, crossing fingers on PSDirect, eyes glued to Wario 64, or staying up to 3am. Time that could've spent doing other things. Scalpers DO serve a function, and that is reducing shortage and that bad things that come with it. The more scalper, the less inefficiency, as nails on a chalkboard as that might sound.
OK, so remember my pin in demand going up and down? My point in that chain is the price is a moving target. The "actual price," if there is one, would be where there is no shortage and no surplus. The equilibrium. The actual price, in this case, is definitely not the $500 that Sony put MSRP at, because it's just an articifial price ceiling as we might call it. If the retail price of PS5 reduces from $500 to $400 after a few years, no one says Sony is giving you a $100 discount on the "actual price" of a PS5. All it is, beyond the components becoming cheaper, is the price meeting the demand. And the same logic applies to scalping, even if it's not Sony or the retailers themselves doing it. Scalpers are not charging extra in any different way than Sony is charging less when the price goes down. So arguing with the premise of $500 being the "actual price" in any kind of normative sense because that's where Sony sells it at doesn't really make sense. It could be $600 or $400 and we'd still be in the same situation.
