Market Discussions

I guess it's either one of the following:
1. That person does not want to play the .1 game and does not really care for the price, as long as it's below market, or
2. That person wants the item badly and knows, that with that difference in buy orders, other buyers will wait until his buy order is fullfilled.

Those would be my guesses.

Because **** you, that's why.

Thank you for your responses. However, the example I brought does not sufficiently demonstrate the actual mechanic of the manipulation. You may notice such manipulations when you see undercutting orders appear systematically and multiple times as soon as someone updates their order, and they either have a round number like 100,000,000.00 or same digit like 111,111,111.11 or 222,222,222.22. Many of them are bids for multiple items, which shows that the bidder is not a consumer, but a trader (who needs 20 implants at the same time).

Would it ever be possible the person setting the high buy order is also in fact a seller and is attempting to raise the average buy order to hopefully push up the sell order before they cash out.?

example I buy high quantities of item A at low price x, I then begin setting higher and higher buy orders x+1, x+2 etc etc. If lucky overtime the sell order price may increase depending on supply/demand(yes, it's a gamble but profitable when it works) and then you begin cashing out just before you think the price is about to plateau out.

But from the image it just appears like the person wanted their buy order to fill fast and still receive the item cheaper than the sell order, no manipulation going on. Maybe a little OCD but I would have rounded off the number rather than what looks like just putting a random amount greater than other buy orders :p

I see couple of reasons why would you undercut by bigger margin.

Example A
Item *** is on market for 10mil and costs 2mil to produce. Couple of guys play isk war at 10mil and that item is at 3-4mil in other regions. Sell volume is low and it wont get any bigger. If I have volume of that product, I'll put it for quite less then 10mil, probably 4-6mil and crash the price. Also manufacturing costs between people could be very different. In example someone used buy order and someone used sell order.

Example B (also mentioned by PopplerRo)
I want to make a profit on market diff of item ***. I put buy order for 4mil, it sells for 10 and i set up sell order for 4,5mil.
Now if I'm above some "usual" price, sellers will often sell to my buy order as it is already close to my sell order. As long as I'm buying little faster then selling I'm making 300-350k per transaction. Works best with fast moving items that goes in volume.

Example C
I came across item in loot can of guy I killed and want to convert it to cash as fast as possible to upgrade my pew pew ship and have fun in this game.

.......

I do this sometimes when the market has been manipulated up and I want to get the stuff cheaper. It works best on a highly traded product.

Keep dropping the price and hope that someone else 0.1 isks you. Then do it again (sometimes I will just fight with myself. Others 0.1isk you and you set a new baseline for prices. Once it drops enough, I buy up a load.

Undercutting for me has 2 reasons

- Pushing people out of the market by dumping stock
- I still make profit by undercutting under the production price lvls of others and make my money based on a high turnover

Undercutting that I see by others

- Mining gets you ' Free Minerals'
- People who dont get marketing mechanics and just dump stuff in the market

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The picture you posted shows someone who wants a guaranteed buy.
Massive market manipulation is very normal in RL, think about the Libor fines of the moment.

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The "price discovery" is not a term I would use, I would prefer to call it "testing market elasticity".

• Do others have stocks,
• Is it mostly a station trading or (inter) regional market,
• do people monitor the market,
• what is the production-cycle-reaction-time by producers,
• on what margin do industrialists leave the market,
• etc.

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About countering the market, if it is a speculational station market, just wait out the wave and act acordingly.
If its an interregional market dominated by Industrialts, try to compete on volume, in stead of price.
Its dependant on the situation

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And what other said ;)... Driving up the price by buy order lvl, or a market noob wanting a short term solution. The only annoying people are the ones like Billy Hix ;).

It's a far more realistic method of price discovery than undercutting by .01isk every 5 minutes.

It's a time/effort tradeoff. I, objectively, value my time and effort higher than those who want to spend their time checking their orders every 5 minutes to make sure they're on top. I say that without prejudice or insult; if they want to play that game, they are free to do so.

I'm simply happy to drive margins to slim levels in exchange for far more certainty that when I check my orders in a couple of hours time, they'll still be on top.

Big margins attract a lot of competition. Small margins keeps people away.

People are motivated by incentive. The motivation for cutting price is obvious, to make the sale and we see that RL all the time. The thing you don't see RL is the big crazy price changes we see in Eve.

Again, it goes to incentive. No one in Eve has to eat, pay the mortgage save for retirement or save for the cat's liver operation. There is no incentive to not starve to death.

Also, compared to the real world, the Eve markets are tiny. Small markets tend to experience more price volatility. The fewer participants there are in a market, the less diverse is the pool of value judgements, or stated another way, much larger divergence in the possible participants' marginal utility of money.

For those of you who want an empirical view: If utils could be measured, which of course they can not, but bear with me here, imagine you could average out all the marginal utility of money for all of the participants in a market. And then average all those below and all those above the over all average. In the real world, the high average and the low average would be closer to the overall average. In a small market, the average high and average low utilities are further from the overall average.