Time for another crackpot idea from the desk of Disgraced Economist & Man About Town, Doktor Buzzo.
Consider the holiday shopping season, the fickle minds of our loved ones and the deft manipulation of our material desires by those devils that practice the sinister art of advertising. What happens when a toy store begins to run low on its supply of this year's Must Have Gift for Youngsters? Think back to the year 1996 and the Tickle Me Elmo hysteria (or you can go here: [wikipedia]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tickle_Me_Elmo#Employees_injured). In other words: bedlam. The current logic of the store, say, buying up 100+ units of ore for $230 on turn 9 (when there are only a handful of plots remaining to be configured using a yet-to-be-purchased M.U.L.E.) or selling the entire food supply for $50 per unit before turn 3 is quaintly out of step with how a real (simulated) economy would set prices.
It seems a little old-fashioned for the store to sell and buy at prices that do not adjust as supplies decrease or increase. Yes, prices can change from one turn to the next, but that isn't very realistic when we consider that each turn represents a month's time. Elmo dolls sold for much less (comparatively) on December 29th than they did on December 21st, and for obvious reasons. Things should work the same way in the store on Irata.
The classic example we can all relate to is the "buy up all the ore" play. If I ran the store, I might start with a particular selling price but decide I need to increase this price quickly if there's a run of purchases. Otherwise I won't have any way to make the expected number of M.U.L.E.s to be deployed during the next turn. Similarly, if there has been a recent food shortage and now the colonists have produced an overabundance of food, I might buy the first few units at a high price but have little interest in buying the entire month's production at that same inflated rate, since the total production might conceivably last for several more months.
What I'm describing is the marginal rate of price change. This should derive directly from each commodity's changing marginal utility to the colonists and the store. I propose that during times of shortage or impending shortage the store's offer price (either buying or selling) be high and that the rate of change for marginal sales increase slowly until a near-term shortage has been averted. This would make the economy of Irata more like the economy most of us are used to living with here on boring old Earth. Fires, earthquakes and personal disasters would still have their appropriately disruptive effects. Players could still decide it is advantageous to hoard supplies in order to manipulate prices. But the monthly "lock-step" manner in which prices currently change has a disproportionately large effect on the game's balance and does not represent an efficient store policy, for both the price discovery and critical supply maintenance purposes that the store would (and should) serve.
Every commodity has a base minimum and maximum price, and those should remain unchanged. But the offer prices should move more appropriately when the store's supplies are rapidly decreasing or increasing. Early sales to the store of scare goods should be more highly rewarded, and late purchases from the store of goods that are scarce or approaching scarcity should cost more. In the case of requiring a "tie-breaker" to determine who makes the transaction, the current system of lowest-ranked player having highest priority should continue to be sufficient, so long as this too is updated each time the store transacts for a unit. Commodity pricing for sales between players would not change in any way, since the current system still serves as an efficient mechanism for price discovery. Similarly there is no reason to change the behavior of "spinning the dial" on the store's buy line when it has sold out of a commodity, since the elevated price will not be paid the store but only by another player.
And just in case anyone worries that this might effect Crystite: nope. I don't see any reason to mess with a perfectly good, perfectly random process.
Thanks for reading! I hope this proposal is not deemed too heretical; I do not wish to be branded an apostate.
