Okay, this is downright spooky.
Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
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- naruto rationalist romance armageddon is looking better and better damn you kishimoto explosions everywhere explosives solve everyone if in doubt surrender to the mercy of zabuza it seemed like a good idea at the time looks like a really bad case of being a jōnin my god. where does the lore end? precommitting is the winning plan screaming in kagome screw the rules i have explosives something bad might still happen sometimes you gotta sociopath stabby zabby subsection c of paragraph 9 should include we can weaponize this so hard open voting
Okay, this is downright spooky.
Emstar
The Shining One
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- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
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Does it matter in essence? If you just "Buy all seals below or at X price" to resell them later, and X is the tower price, and you buy your own seal, then you dont make or lose money on buying your own seal, and your volume on the market from either strategy remains the same.
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- Location
- Phoenix, AZ
My understanding was that "50% must be sold at the fixed Tower rate" meant "the tower will buy up to 50% of your seals at this price, and you need to sell them at that price if not selling to the Tower."
So, as an example, lets say explosive seals have current market demand of X ryo / seal. The Tower is salty that they aren't getting explosives for free anymore due to collusion against them, but are willing to pay up to X / 2 for the seals to prevent a ninja revolt.
For the purposes of modeling, we'll treat the tower as independent from the rest of the economy. If the tower buys all their 50% of the market, then we have our simplest case where the general populace buys seals for X. If the tower needs more than 50% of the market, they'll begin buying seals at X, increasing demand, theoretically raising the price which explosive seals sell at (if seal masters bother following demand -- actual retailers IRL often don't, but that's a separate conversation).
If the Tower buys less than 50% of the explosive seals, then we have a weird split in the market, where half the seals are sold at X / 2. This does not in theory adjust the demand of the market, but it does increase the supply by up to 50%, which will reduce the optimal price (again, if sealmasters are actually following demand curves) this implies that market prices will lower below X.
Depending on the supply and demand modeling you use, you'll get different results, but I don't think you'll find a ultimate price change of more than 50% due to the supply doubling.
Basically, the only time where the market price of the seals will go below the tower price is if the Tower normally buys a large amount of the seals, but doesn't happen to buy them at that moment, or if the Tower set their price above the market demand for some reason (which I assume they would quickly correct if that were the case).
Effectively, so far as I'm aware the "exploit" that people are discussing boils down to little more than "buy when prices are low then sell when they're high" which, uh, isn't something unique to the licensing and is likely more dependent on the demand (which is largely going to be dictated by the Tower as the primary purchases of these seals).
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"Buy all seals below or at X price" means you're competing with all the incumbents who probably have those sales booked out for years, so it's harder to ensure that you can actually access this supply.
Jello_Raptor
(Confirmed Jelly)
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- Left of Center
But the outcome of this is exactly what I suggested, the requirement of sale is the thing my smell test is plinking on.
Sure, but there's a reason "<simple model> plus 5-20% noise" is my shorthand for so many things. In life as in quantum mechanics, the simple cases take up most of the probability mass.
TL;DR: I don't have that great an imagination when it comes to politics.
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-unless the market price is below the tower price, and the tower is being an absolute hardass about intraclan sales as a way to limit clan influence and encourage integration.
zap lunch
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- Location
- UK
But that's even easier to break!
If it's only a tower mandated price, but not one they will actually purchase at?
- Location
- UK
Then what do you do with the seals nobody is buying??
Lower the Tower price until somebody does. The point is to maximize Tower authority and social stability, not seal production.
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- UK
Which only happens when the Tower price is at or below market price. If it's exactly at market price then it's a meaningless concession, otherwise we're back into exploit land.
Emstar
The Shining One
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- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
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My thoughts differ from your conclusion even in this scenario, but I find it difficult to unpack them without spending a massive pile of time on it.
*shrugs*
I'll go simulate a bunch of trading strategies competing against each other when this becomes immediately relevant (sometime after the tourny most likely).
Alright, trivially exploit the Tower price being above market price without anybody involved risking the wrath of the ANBU. Keep in mind that this whole, "Living together without trying to kill each other", thing is barely living-memory old. Social stability is the trump factor being optimized by the unbeatable god-warrior making the rules.
Price floors create famines, which, oh, hey, seems to be exactly what we see in the seal market.
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- Location
- UK
Assuming the Tower is actually buying at their denoted price: Buy from the market at price P. Sell seals, half at price P, half at price T>P.
If the reason people don't do that is because the ANBU get pissy, all I can say is that you've got a really fucky economy.
Unless you're envisioning a system where the Tower is already just buying all the seals everyone makes at price T, which would be strange but not implausible.
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- Location
- Phoenix, AZ
Fair warning: modeling supply and demand is a really hard thing to do and pretty much all models quickly fall apart outside of locally optimized instances -- source: am a retail data scientist.
As I said before, run the analysis again without assuming that the Tower who can tax arbitrary quantities at no expense to itself is buying at the stated price.
If the economy weren't, "fucky", the merchant council wouldn't exist in the first place. The village system global economy is demonstrably not optimizing for sheer, ruthless economic efficiency. The real world has a multitude of examples of large populations settling for less total yeild in exchange for more equitable and thus socially stable distributions.
- Location
- UK
- Location
- UK
You misunderstood me; I wasn't saying that's exploitable, I'm saying it ends up with nobody ever selling any seals...
...except for the people doing circular trades, who win the market and get to ignore the Tower price rule.
Scalpers ultimately drive down the real market price. At some point sealmasters have to say, "Hey, if our surplus isn't going to the desired destination anyway, why not just raise prices until the 50% we're allowed to sell under-value go to the people we want even if it subsidizes everybody else?
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
On the vote: Will be sleeping soon (coffee doesn't work anymore I guess), ping me with edits for tomorrow morning.
On the economics: AFAICT there is nothing stopping you pricing all your volume at September 15th into Tower Price and Tower Price +1, after spending the previous two weeks buying anything sold at or less than Tower Price. As long as you are able to convert a controlling share of the total market volume to yours, you should win out. The hard work is in actually doing that. If it turns out everyone has pre-arranged contracts extending out for the next 5 years, well... you are the market now, since everything else is effectively booked. Just make seals and pop them off, and sell it on the cheap to undercut. If it turns out that thats not the case, and we have a continuous stream of sales throughout the month.... well, you win out merely by buying everything and reselling. If you spare some effort, no one will ever even know its you thats doing this. You're guaranteed to be able to make some returns, because theres a guaranteed pile of stuff at the Tower price for you to buy from
The sticking point is this immutable tower price. You just dance your strategy around how people price their goods relative to the tower price with the understanding that half of their goods will be priced at this price anyway. If they want to sell to a particular person they'll do that. If they won't sell to anyone but one person, they aren't even in the market, not really. If they're willing to sell to you, or to someone random who isn't you, you can game this anyway (catspaws).
I'm like, fairly sure that this sort of thing would work just fine in your standard 14th century marketplace type economic climate.
Noburi is too cool for math, obviously.
On the economics: AFAICT there is nothing stopping you pricing all your volume at September 15th into Tower Price and Tower Price +1, after spending the previous two weeks buying anything sold at or less than Tower Price. As long as you are able to convert a controlling share of the total market volume to yours, you should win out. The hard work is in actually doing that. If it turns out everyone has pre-arranged contracts extending out for the next 5 years, well... you are the market now, since everything else is effectively booked. Just make seals and pop them off, and sell it on the cheap to undercut. If it turns out that thats not the case, and we have a continuous stream of sales throughout the month.... well, you win out merely by buying everything and reselling. If you spare some effort, no one will ever even know its you thats doing this. You're guaranteed to be able to make some returns, because theres a guaranteed pile of stuff at the Tower price for you to buy from
The market price is irrelevant. If its lower than the Tower price, then you just buy it all up.
The sticking point is this immutable tower price. You just dance your strategy around how people price their goods relative to the tower price with the understanding that half of their goods will be priced at this price anyway. If they want to sell to a particular person they'll do that. If they won't sell to anyone but one person, they aren't even in the market, not really. If they're willing to sell to you, or to someone random who isn't you, you can game this anyway (catspaws).
I'm like, fairly sure that this sort of thing would work just fine in your standard 14th century marketplace type economic climate.
Hazou had to learn a bunch of math from Kagome and Keiko knows deep and powerful mathemagic (someone probably lost an undergrad stats book somewhere in universe or something).
Noburi is too cool for math, obviously.
- Location
- Phoenix, AZ
Let's do an example: we'll say Tower Price is 50, "normal demand" is 100, we have 1000 starting funds, the market is arbitrarily large, and it's simple to purchase seals at either the tower price or normal demand prices.
I buy 20 seals at the tower price of 50
Now I have 20 seals, and 0 Funds
Now, I want to sell my seals, so I sell half of them at the tower price in accordance with my license and the other half at "normal demand" price of 100 per seal
Now I have 0 seals, and 1500 funds
This works, but effectively is just saying "I can beat the market in terms of availability" -- we assume that despite 50% of the goods being available at the tower price, we can purchase 100% of the goods at the tower price. This effectively requires both that the tower price is available to your purchase, and that the tower price is unavailable to the person you're selling it to. Without special connections or extenuating circumstances (i.e. large fluctuations in demand, preferential access to Tower prices for purchasing, collusion with other licensed sellers), I don't think that this situation is going to happen.
I buy 20 seals at the tower price of 50
Now I have 20 seals, and 0 Funds
Now, I want to sell my seals, so I sell half of them at the tower price in accordance with my license and the other half at "normal demand" price of 100 per seal
Now I have 0 seals, and 1500 funds
This works, but effectively is just saying "I can beat the market in terms of availability" -- we assume that despite 50% of the goods being available at the tower price, we can purchase 100% of the goods at the tower price. This effectively requires both that the tower price is available to your purchase, and that the tower price is unavailable to the person you're selling it to. Without special connections or extenuating circumstances (i.e. large fluctuations in demand, preferential access to Tower prices for purchasing, collusion with other licensed sellers), I don't think that this situation is going to happen.
This is true, but I assume that if someone started colluding with another sealmaster to circumnavigate the tower prices (thus defeating the intent of the law), they'd likely just be told "Stop that, unless you want your license revoked."
- Location
- UK
@eaglejarl @Velorien @OliWhail Can I make a proposal for a different license rule that's the same in spirit but should remove a lot of this weirdness? I suspect it'll save spoons and reduce exploitability.
Now: X% of seals must be sold at a reduced fixed rate, and Y seals/month are taken as tax.
Suggested: M% of seals are taken as tax, and N seals/month must be sold to the Tower at a reduced fixed rate.
I suspect good numbers are M% ≈ 25% and N ≈ 100.
Now: X% of seals must be sold at a reduced fixed rate, and Y seals/month are taken as tax.
Suggested: M% of seals are taken as tax, and N seals/month must be sold to the Tower at a reduced fixed rate.
I suspect good numbers are M% ≈ 25% and N ≈ 100.