no, the scalpers will push the price of the auctions up, buying them all well above retail, only to turn around and sell them at an even higher price when they're no longer available.
supply is the only thing that is going to end the reselling market.
In theory you would have scalpers competing with each other and driving up the prices way beyond what consumers would be willing to pay. For instance, PS5 is $500 RRP and you see people giving in and paying $1200 ish to scalpers, but in the auction scenario, you'd have scalpers who end up paying well above retail (remember, they want to pay "retail" so they can jack up the prices) and therefore a large chunk of scalpers just wouldn't bother at all.
To be more specific:
Scalpers right now are buying the console (via bots) at $500 (or slightly more depending on whatever bundle they're forced to buy) and then selling them for around $1000 because $1000 seems to be the max-ish that "regular" consumers are willing to pay.
If we had an auction system, a few things would/should happen:
(1) Scalpers now have to pay more (on average) for their "cost of goods sold" (if you think of them running a business, as many of them clearly are).
(2) Scalpers have to sell (
or rather, find consumers willing to buy) their "goods" at (potentially) significantly more than $1000 to secure a similar profit margin.
(3) Since there are fewer potential customers willing to buy your scalper goods the higher you price, fewer scalpers participate in scalping.
(4) Fewer scalpers participate in scalping.
(5) The very notion of an auction system itself means that it would end up being people using bots who are waging bidding wars against each other (assuming auctions can be botted too).
(6) By the time the consumers willing to pay "surge pricing" for PS5s have their fix, you'll be left with regular customers who just want it for the good old $500. These people are the ones who are very unlikely to pay more than retail at all and so the scalpers have even less incentive to bother.
In theory, I like it since if this is the new normal and we're going to have to pay over the odds at the beginning of every product release, I'd rather that money went straight to the companies that made those products rather than to some leeches who are really adding no value (no they're aren't "middle men" because people in those positions who are adding value usually provide some sort of service (aggregating information from both sides on a transaction, providing some sort of mediation service etc etc), scalpers are providing nothing except the opportunity to line their pockets).