Measuring Market Share and Competition: How much COF is really RubiCOF?

Another economics related post here…

This time I’m thinking about measuring competition and market share. Market share is the the amount of the market accounted for by a specific entity. When can calculate the market share if we know the total sales of a given product during a period and the amount of sales of one company’s products.

For example if 27 BWS are sold in a week on the Katoa CX and company X sold 13 of them then company X’s share of the BWS market would be 13/27 or roughly 48.1% of the Katoa BWS market.

In the real world it can be difficult to accurately determine market share. Economists and market analysts are paid to work on these types of problems. Inside of PrUn we have a market system that has perfect knowledge of all sales with the amounts and parties involved. This leads to a few questions…

  1. Can we in any way determine market share within the game right now? I think that one of the bigger issues with this is that the volume numbers provided by the CX are in currency values and not units of the items in question. Making a change from currency to units would make it possible for a person to look at the daily or weekly CX data and compare it against their sales orders to figure out their market share.

  2. Should PrUn itself provide more information about market share? Since PrUn will never have large numbers of paid analysts trying to pick apart and understand its economy in the way it happens in the real world maybe the CXs should take advantage of their perfect market knowledge and provide a market share summary for a given period similar to the period on the price chart?

We can go beyond just the idea of Market Share and think of measuring competition. Market share is used in few methods of measuring the competition within a market. For example:

The HHI index is used in the US for determining when the mergers of firms have antitrust issues. Since we don’t have mergers in PrUn what might it be used for? We could use it to analyze in a quantitative fashion how competitive different markets are.

I’m interested to find out if other players have thought on these issues before and what opinions might be out there on the usefulness of adding some type of market share data to the game.

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I am absolutely in favor of more information being available to all.

And let me propose a hierarchy:

  • Local Market deals are entirely private, known only to the parties involved.
  • Player built exchange trades (assuming player built exchanges become a thing in the future), are known to both the involved traders and the owner of the exchange (which I hope is a corporation)
  • Developer built exchange trades are fully public and available to all

Given the limited size of the developer team, I think this is an opportunity to leverage the community. Make the data available via either an API or a browser data feed like so much stuff is today, and let the community build the interface/tool to display/visualize it.

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