Screwball Market Price Model?

Just started playing this game again, glad to see that product quality now has an actual purpose aside from tricking people into paying more money than they budget.

I'm doing some forecasting/planning, and I notice that despite deep shortages, Road Maintenance's price is absolutely unmoving:

https://imgur.com/a/BXQWdgQ

What kind of market pricing model is the game using that justifies zero price movement during a shortage? Should that price not be rising to incentivize firms to enter?

Or is it the price history graphing that's broken?

All products have a minimum price, base price, and maximum price. When a product is in shortage, it moves up toward the maximum price one notch. When it is in surplus, it moves down toward the minimum price one notch. The base price is somewhere between the two extreme ends. Once the product reaches the minimum or maximum, it cannot move any further. Road maintenance has been in shortage for sometime and is likely at the maximum price, which is why it is no longer moving.

Hope that helps!

Ah, maximum prices. No wonder there's so many constant shortages.

we would love to let products free to move up and down the price scale and let the market do it.

But you then need many players who take advantage of it and start corporations and then the market can regulate itself.

currently it does not happen.

we had an error once and a product did not have a maximum price.

It went to 50 times the standard price before we started letting it fall by 5% per game month, for a long time, until it came back.

Andy,

How about creating some report to show most profitable corporations? With such report corporations without price limit should be noticed shortly also that would help players to build right ones as now it is pretty difficult to understand, especially for the new players.

You could place such report somewhere in new corporations page so that information could be used prior building corporations.