Product pricing (Golden Rainbow)

So I just put 50 game years of product supply/demand/price information into a spreadsheet and got very, very confused. Turns out bizarre things seems to happen in this world, like prices dropping when there is a sustained shortage. Best guess is the game has some notion of a baseline price for each product and tries to nudge the market price towards it regardless of market conditions. Anyone got any better suggestions?

I heard or read somewhere the gm or the system is programmed to counter large scale attempts at price manipulation. Price going too far up or down could have some unforeseen consequence. Likely that is done to preserve stability of the larger economy.

357. Market Manipulation [ top ]
Market manipulations are an interesting part of the game and will remain. However, we have seen many country registrations that are used to purchase large quantities of products while the country is immediately abandoned and the process repeats itself many times.

If a group of players wants to try and influence the market, they should commit real resources and take a risk while doing so. Buying products, using a second account is cheating and causes price changes at no risk at all. Other players are placing orders at unrealistic prices to influence the price without buying the products.

Simcountry has several features that protect players against such actions.

When computing product offerings and requests, only market price orders are counted. Shortages and surpluses are based on market price and give a true picture of the market. This eliminates the influence of fix price orders and o

hmm, interesting. That seems to indicate the game is designed to actually enforce free market behaviour, not manipulate it for price stability. Which rather fails to explain the observed data.