World Balance is doomed until ..

[Zojha]

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.

[pushin_tin]

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.

Found the econ major.