Quote Originally Posted by Vespar View Post
The marketboard prices vary from server to server because that is the nature of the market boards.
More precisely, it is the nature of mono- and oligopolies. Large servers like Balmung are the only ones even remotely getting close to the ideal of perfect competition where everyone is a price taker and thus the only ones where a market is even remotely allocatively efficient as per economic theory. But even there, you'll have a lot of local oligopolies because every good represents an individual market and there's just too many goods to create a full coverage with the limited retainer space. And whenever a market isn't perfectly competitive, allocation of goods will be inefficient.

And when a market is inefficient, you'd generally want the government to step in. Hence antitrust laws etc. Or in SEs case, handing out crafted glamour items via PotD hoards/retainers etc.