Not so Fixed Price

Hi,

In the previous month (August 5226), I put up an offer at fixed price of 2,834 SC$ for 20M Coal, a product with a very large shortage on LU.

Now, in Sep 5227, all of it was sold, however:

Price	Quantity
1,083 SC$	5,832,942
1,995 SC$	183,099
2,000 SC$	2,878,915
2,018 SC$	158,709
2,072 SC$	11,333,838
2,114 SC$	64,914
2,194 SC$	109,729
Grand Total	20,562,146

None of the prices it was sold at is anywhere near the 2,834 SC$ I was asking, which happens to be the market price the game lists. I'm also a bit confused why it isn't exactly 20M.

Can I please have some explanation for the above?
The country was Lance of Longinus, on LU, on Sep 01 5227.


If I place a selling order, I would expect my price to be treated as an ask, meaning that only offers that meet or exceed my asking price should be matched. What isn't matched goes on to be listed in the next month.

You seem to have found yet another example of trade strategies not working the way you'd hope.This is related to the thing I've been yelling about.

The way you describe your expectations is the way it used to work. My digging, which can be found at that link below indicates that Tom Willard got bent about about the old system, and proceeded to "fix" it in circa 2009. Apparently back when one could "cash out your assets", this was costing them money. There maybe some old game updates that could be found, but I've not hat time to look.

https://www.simcountry.com/discus/messages/1/30120.html?1723270315

There, I also give links to past discussions containing alot of info about the matter, than would save alot time.

I have not had any success in engaging the GM on this, and suspect they no longer remember how it works and don't have time to go look.

One thing to try is to make to offers, one at best and one at fixed. See what happens.

That was a good suggestion.

I placed two offers.

Coal	5,000,000	tons	2,800 SC$	January 27 5228
Coal	5,000,000	tons	best price	January 27 5228

And they were sold as:

Price	Quantity
2,071 SC$	5,494,411
2,834 SC$	5,000,000
Total	10,494,411

First row is for the fixed price, second is for the best price.

With this I can say that the fixed price selling strategy for countries is not working as intended. Because it is not respecting the asking price I set, using some arbitrary price (are there even buying orders with that price?), and it is creating supply out of nowhere. This really needs to be looked at.


I'll have a look at the thread you posted, hymy, but that should be for corporate strategies.

The mismatch of quantities is puzzling.
I have never seen it before and I wonder where the product comes from.
if you have exactly 5.000.000 units of the product, will it sell more?
how much remains in the country?

I also do not see anything about the quality.

We know exactly how it works and selling more than offered is not part of it.

The person who wrote the trading process in the first place is not available any more but the one who is doing it now, has done it for years, and many discussions on the forum made us discuss it many times and made us look into the code many times.

The price is indeed nearly never fixed.
the reason is that in nearly all cases, there are no exact matching orders.
Many times it is a price mismatch and even more times, it is the quality mismatch.

the trading process cannot leave everything for the next month because the market will stall and the chance that there will be a match next month is as small as the chance this month.

The trading process is bending over and forces transactions to a limit.

The main difficulty of course is that "The game" is not buying anything and not selling anything. There must be someone else on the other side of the transaction.
(there are some exceptions but these are linked to immediate trading).

I have to think about how to test single aspects.
I will talk to the engineer who is responsible for this, and we will first concentrate on the mismatching quantities.
These are weird.

I would suspect that the mismatching quantity, relates to quality is some way.

I'd be surprised if there is a different system for corps and countries, but Andy could tell us.

Okay, another problem I have with this is that I cannot even sell my stuff at a fair price using fixed pricing.

I went to repeat Laguna's experiment with 2 1M offers of electric power. My power is Q263 and the market price is 111200. So my power should sell for 292456. But the game will only allow it to be sold at a fixed price of 222,400.00.

So there is no logical reason to sell at fixed price, The GM should fix it or remove it. There are almost no examples where it makes sense to use it for selling anything.

It's only useful for buying stuff, where you can offer a little more and skip the wait.

And wouldn't ya just know it the best price engine as usual reduced the quality by 11 pts, thus selling it at 11% percent discount.

As I said before, we will retest selling at a fixed price.

both with fixed price and at market price, you forget that when you sell, there must be a buyer who wants to pay the price and pay for the quality.

most times there are none.

You cannot determine what the execution price will be because you have no idea what the other side wants.

It is more complex than the real world share market because there, apple shares are apple shares. There are no qualities involved.
and then, there are so many trades at all prices that make matching possible.

In our trading, a product with a quality which is 10% higher than another offer or request, looks to the trading mechanism as if it is 10% cheaper than the price requested.

The trading process is making concessions, both ways.
you just mentioned the 11% which is used in one of the many trading situation to be the max tradeoff.

At that price, there was probably a match that most probably became available after some bending on the other side.

We have tested many tradeoffs trying on one hand to minimize the size of the tradeoff and on the other hand, allow the market to trade and not accumulate millions of untradable offers and orders.

Hi,

To answer the questions:
1. My initial country stock was of 20M of Coal. The offers were of 10M and all sold. My final country stock was of 10M.

The extra quantity sold did not come off my country stock.

2. In the meantime I sold a single unit of coal to see if it would create supply. Fortunately, it did not.

3. My stock's quality is 259. Almost all of it was sold at 248Q for both the Fixed Price and Best Price offers. That is ok.


I understand that to match supply and demand there have to be some concessions, however there were buying offers at the price I was asking. I set my price to the max price in a market that was deeply in shortage since I've rejoined. But I was only able to match with those offers at Best Price.

For reference, the country buying orders works just fine.

Edit2: The price of electric power in December was 111200, so this is a case I've described where the market price is not honored.

Edited: The price of power fell between these. Accounting for that I got the same result for both.

OH BTW, Laguna, the last line of the recent sales log repeats as the first line of the next page. Any chance that's where your extra came from?

The extra quantity comes from that then.

To clarify, there was no extra quantity created in the process of selling country stock. It was a mistake on my end when summarizing the information, because the transaction logs repeats a transaction between pages.

To add some detail on what I would expect, mirroring what happens in real world exchanges/trading venues:

If I enter a selling offer my price is an ask. Meaning that any bids at or higher than ask are a match to my offer. For instance, if you are trading on screen and you have the following situation:

Timestamp	Q	Bid
10:00:00	100	27
10:05:00	120	26
10:12:00	150	25
10:00:00	500	20

You enter a selling order of 200 units at a price 25, you are matched with the following at these prices:

Timestamp	Q	Bid
10:00:00	100	27
10:05:00	100	26

You eat all the quantities up to 200, and each transaction happens at the initiators' price - in this case, you are paid for the first offer at 27 per unit, and the second offer at 26 per unit.

Meaning that the market after your order is the following:

Timestamp	Q	Bid
10:05:00	20	26
10:12:00	150	25
10:00:00	500	20

The overall point here is that prices in selling or buying orders should be seen as inequality conditions, and matched in order of best bid/ask.


There is a distinction that needs to be made between the above and Simcountry. The real world is mostly a sequential game (as in the game theory term) and that is why most platforms use a price-time priority on offers. For us the game is simultenous. So we'll have to use a different priority, such as price-quantity: best bids/asks get satisfied first, if there are more at the same price, the largest quantities go first. We can also choose to only use price as a priority, and the last ones to be matched at the same price are done so pro-rata.

As a note, besides the selling at fixed price issue reported above, I think the game does a decent job in matching supply and demand. But I'm leaving this information here if you ever go about overhauling the algorthym.

If you are selling a product at fixed price and enter an outrageous number the game will tell you what the maximum possible asking price is. It seems like the max price is "market price without quality effects" x 2.00. Which would mean the feature is useless for products with a quality above 200.

That message is in reference to only one of the factors that go into the final price you receive:

1. Ignore quality, and tell me what is the price you want.
2. When the trade happens, the price will be multiplied by Q/100.

This is evident when you consult the transaction logs:

Product	When	Quantity	Quality	Price Paid	Price@100Q	What happened?
Coal on Kebir Blue Market	Aug 02 5456	606,745	242	2,983 SC$	1,233 SC$	Market Sale executed.

I think you have to factor in quality in your asking price, the game does not seem do that for you when it comes to fixed price sales. IE if market price is 1000 SC$ and your product quality is 150, you would have to ask for 1500 SC$ to sell at market price.

The only way to be sure your get quality adjusted market price (at negative 8-11 quality of course) is to use best price. If you use time based, there are alot weird things that may happen, some good and some bad. On long term average time based likely just equals best price. At least with best price you get a steady average price.