Positioning

[buells]

I guess this probably isn't possible in the current version, but I think it would be interesting to have different market segments for each product.

For example, customers would not unanimously prefer an 80 quality car selling at 15,000 rated 50 overall over a 40 quality car selling at 12,000 rated 30 in the current game. Instead, one segment of the market would prefer the premium product while the other segment would prefer the budget priced alternative. Branding could be accounted for by similar means.

Each segment would consist of consumers with a particular set of preferences. The problem might be that in the game as it is now the producer with better quality probably does not have much higher marginal costs and could dominate both segments easily.

Instead of an overall rating, products could have a rating for their appeal to each segment. Different customer segments could have different propensities to exhibit brand loyalty. They could also vary from city to city based on its real wage rate. Finally, they could have different propensities to patronize specialty stores versus discount megastores.

[counting]

This is a very interesting proposition. From an economic stand point, we would assume every consumer has its utility function when given price, quality, brand, etc. And the over-all demand within a local market is the aggregate result of all the utility functions. In a way current rating system is the average utility functions that stands for everyone in a city. A good analog but not accurate.

From a computer simulation perspective, it is theoretically possible to make each consumer an individual agent and giving them different utility functions spread out like normal distribution. However by doing so will seriously slow down the simulation, since millions agents would just cost too much computation resources (time and space, the complexity is just too much). And your proposal will be in the middle but break down consumers into predefined groups, with average utility preference within the group. However this will bare the question of how to distribute each group with each sellers. Since citizens right now don't actually lived in a geological location, but only simulated with traffic index. The combination between sellers and customer groups will create N*M pairs of conditions to be considered and might be quite difficult to program for developers. Another question is that how to initialize these groups with their preference/utility? and split to how many groups? what's the size of each group? Even the question of how to display these many groups with current interface?

There are many factors and things can be discussed, say like it only splits in 3 to 5 income group, and combined this to the city simulation expansion pack, so we could also use them as tax-base details, with more statistic data to be shown in charts. But no matter what this will be a core change since it touches the very core of supply and demand directly.

[buells]

Well one way I can think of doing it is to make more products. For example, instead of just "car," you'd have economy, luxury, SUV, etc. Kind of like now you have sports watch, elegant watch, and silver watch. Except for cars, you could have the same inputs for each kind of car, but have a different market. The number of units of luxury cars that could be sold would be lower, but you could charge a higher price for each one. The marginal cost per luxury car would be higher due to a higher assembly cost instead of a higher cost of inputs. The rating of a luxury car would be more dependent on quality than price vis a vis the economy car. Arguably, branding matters about the same or only slightly more for luxury cars. The hard part would be making a single technology rating apply to two separate products. What this would allow is for a low cost car producer and a high tech, high quality car producer to coexist within the same market. It seems to me that right now low cost producers can really only gain a meaningful edge for products like bottled milk or meat for which the freight charges are astronomical relative to the marginal cost. I hate having to build farms in every city and to wait for them to reach a high quality level from training, so the local low cost guy can outcompete me. In reality, low cost car producers can and do capture a significant share of the overall automobile market.