I want to clear up any possible misunderstandings at the beginning. I am not complaining. I enjoy the game. I think the game is a very robust simulation of an economy. I do think the game can be improved and am offering suggestions to make the game more realistic and more robust.
The Law of One Price is misleading as the name suggests one price should exist everywhere. Price everywhere is determined by local supply and local demand. Both supply and demand are the result of individual actors with minds of their own. People in one city have different priorities from people in other cities.
The Law of One Price applies to fungible commodities. Nobody expects the price of dinner at The Avenue of the Americas to be the same as the price of dinner at Joe's Greasy Spoon.
One should expect the price of something like pig iron of a standard grade (quality) to be about the same everywhere. It there are large price differences, the differences will be removed through arbitrage. Merchants will buy pig iron where it is cheap and sell it where it is expensive. The price where pig iron is cheap will rise over time and the price where pig iron is expensive will fall over time. The two prices will converge to One Price. The limiting factors in the real world are the costs of transportation and regulatory barriers by governments. So, the Law could be restated that the price of fungible commodities will everywhere approach a single value through arbitrage.
Large price differences for fungible commodities exist in Virtonomics. This is due to the different behavior of local merchants. While the different behavior of local consumers is very realistic, the behavior of local producers is not. Let's say the local price of Q 1.00 toys is 31 in Province A and 310 in Province B. That situation would not persist very long in the real world. It is quite possible that consumers in Province A do not like toys and are unwilling to pay much for them. The suppliers, however, would not keep trying to sell their toys in Province A. Just like players, they would set up stores in Province B, or they would wholesale to other people in Province B with stores. So, even without ANY change in demand by consumers in Province A, the price in Province A would rise due to decrease in local supply and a consequent decrease in the quantity of local trades. Differences in local demand curves would show up as differences in the Quantity of trades (market volume per population) rather than price. This effect is absent in Virtonomics.
I think the game handles the local effects of player sales well. The local price and quality gradually changes in the direction of player supplied goods. My suggestion is for the game to have distant effects on the local price of other cities to reflect the Law of One Price. The effects do not even have to be large or sudden; they just need to work gradually over time. I believe this would promote competition and promote the expansion of player sales. I also believe this would introduce a degree of self-correction for imbalances that arise.
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