Suggestion: Monopoly level

[5687VB]

In regarding the discussion of companies in Vic3, I think that the major problem with the lack of the famous Robber barons in the game is that, it is not able to simulate the problems with monopoly and cartels that plague XIX century industrial nations. My suggestion is to create a monopoly level in every building this metric would represent the effect of that sector of the economy being controlled by a small number of powerful capitalists. In this system, if the monopoly level is low the factory runs normally, but as it increases it reduces the number of capitalists jobs slots, besides the workers salaries and production are also reduced to increase the overall wage of the remaining capitalists. This is like a conditional change in the algorithm that runs the factories. Several things can affect this level like laws, pops, technology and etc. For the player, a high monopoly could make capitalist more rich and increase the contribution to the investing pool (positive effect), on the other hand it would increase prices, reduce production output and angry workers (negative effect). Thus, you need to balance this according to your strategy. I think this is a simple abstraction to capture at least the effects and problems of real world monopolies when you are trying to build your society.

 

[Hammrtime]

This is an interesting idea. My question would be how would a player stop monopolies from growing or reverse there growth? I wouldn't want an iron mine baron creating a very high price for my iron that needs to go into building work shop tools and steel.

 

[VineFynn]

Irl the 101 effect of monopolies is to increase prices/decrease quantities (same thing) in such a fashion as to increase profit. You wouldn't be able to do that in V3 (or irl) without making monopolies market-wide, rather than per-building.

 

[Spartakusbund]

In regarding the discussion of companies in Vic3, I think that the major problem with the lack of the famous Robber barons in the game is that, it is not able to simulate the problems with monopoly and cartels that plague XIX century industrial nations. My suggestion is to create a monopoly level in every building this metric would represent the effect of that sector of the economy being controlled by a small number of powerful capitalists. In this system, if the monopoly level is low the factory runs normally, but as it increases it reduces the number of capitalists jobs slots, besides the workers salaries and production are also reduced to increase the overall wage of the remaining capitalists. This is like a conditional change in the algorithm that runs the factories. Several things can affect this level like laws, pops, technology and etc. For the player, a high monopoly could make capitalist more rich and increase the contribution to the investing pool (positive effect), on the other hand it would increase prices, reduce production output and angry workers (negative effect). Thus, you need to balance this according to your strategy. I think this is a simple abstraction to capture at least the effects and problems of real world monopolies when you are trying to build your society.

I feel like this is too simple to depict trusts and monopolies in a satisfying way. For instance, if you're Andrew Carnegie you don't want the coal mines you own to reduce output, even though that would make that individual business more profitable. You would want it to pump out as much coal as possible to feed into your steel mills where you really make your money. You'd need to actually model the cartel in the game and imbue it with decision making power if you wanted to fully capture the dynamic.

I do think having the number of capitalists drop over time might be a good idea, but I think it could work as a Production Method. Maybe that's what Publicly Owned actually does, come to think of it...

 

[Jamaican Castle]

I wonder if monopolies/cartels could be usefully modeled using the same system as angry factions or rebellions. Instead of trying to force some political outcome, they have an economic "demand", but otherwise it's the same concept: a bunch of people, nominally part of your country, who are acting in their own best interest rather than the country's.

And then you could go trustbusting with a slightly more literal approach than was common...

 

[pttaylor]

Irl the 101 effect of monopolies is to increase prices/decrease quantities (same thing) in such a fashion as to increase profit. You wouldn't be able to do that in V3 (or irl) without making monopolies market-wide, rather than per-building.

so you have it set market wide for a given good, but best place to display it is on each building

 

[pttaylor]

This is an interesting idea. My question would be how would a player stop monopolies from growing or reverse there growth? I wouldn't want an iron mine baron creating a very high price for my iron that needs to go into building work shop tools and steel.

The obvious place to put levers to counter monopolies is in government laws and in bureaucracy. Laws promoting competition reduce the growth of monopolies, but are opposed by existing industrialists; Active trustbusting would be a bureaucratic spend, perhaps keyed off of Law Enforcement, and be the main way to remove monopolies that are already entrenched.

 

[MinhowMinhow]

Because of this that I want to use only command economy, now is my monopoly

But seriously, nice suggestion.

 

[Lorehead]

The game might be able to represent oligopoly with a competition level for each good in each market. A perfectly-competitive market would set one price, and a completely monopolistic market would set a higher price and supply a lower quantity. So, set the price to an average weighted to the market concentration. 100% competition makes a market function as perfectly competitive, 0% competition forces all customers to pay the monopoly price, and 50% competition splits the difference. Or this could be discrete levels, like Competitive, Oligopoly, or Monopoly.

 

[Hammrtime]

The obvious place to put levers to counter monopolies is in government laws and in bureaucracy. Laws promoting competition reduce the growth of monopolies, but are opposed by existing industrialists; Active trustbusting would be a bureaucratic spend, perhaps keyed off of Law Enforcement, and be the main way to remove monopolies that are already entrenched.

I guess an anti-trust law would be it. It would mean then you would have to have a government that will pass an anti trust law in the first place. I could see the price of a good getting out of control and causing serious damage to your economy so these laws would be an almost no brainer to pass right away. The only way to not make it an obvious decision is to give the player other ways to avoid monopolization.

A way you could bust the trust is to import from a cheap competitor thus automatically reducing the power of the trust.

 

[Jamaican Castle]

I could see the price of a good getting out of control and causing serious damage to your economy so these laws would be an almost no brainer to pass right away. The only way to not make it an obvious decision is to give the player other ways to avoid monopolization.

There could be other, non-economic benefits to balance against the costs - maybe increased prestige from your brand be a byword for goods in the world, or added political pressure as long as the trust is happy with you. Or you can just let rising prices boost your income and investment pool.

 

[Earmuffs]

[terriblejoke]Maybe you could collect $200 every time a year ticks over?[/terriblejoke]

 

[5687VB]

Yes, anti-trust law should make industrialist very unhappy. So, you could have problems if their interest group is too powerful. I see lots of ways to balance this in such a way it is not OP just to always avoid monopolies, maybe you will need to live with them.

An illustration of political life with monopolies:

 

[5687VB]

I was reading the comments and I think that a monopoly level per good in a market would be even better. Imagine this besides price every good in the market has a monopoly level this will change the behavior of the price, slots of capitalists and etc. But now, the amount and distribution of building producing this product for the market could affect this. For instance, imagine that you have 10 textile mills spreed across 10 territories this should be harder to monopolize than 1 single level 10 textile mill in a single state. This could create some challenges to super concentration of industries, besides other effects we don't know yet.

 

[Razmorg]

I wonder if this would be best covered in a corporations DLC or something? Like it'd be fun if you had this wealthy line of people owning a corporation that keeps getting more powerful and organized and then you have to deal with it spreading maybe even outside your borders. Like take the whole United Fruit Company and their banana republic scheme in south america. So that it isn't "just" a negative effect. Will you be trust busting to maintain a competitive local market or will you compensate by having mega strong corporations that subjugate and exploit other countries?

 

[IsaacCAT]

I totally agree with having monopolies or cartels represented in the game.

If the game were to implement an autonomous algorithm to assign ‘owners’ to buildings, the player could face concentration of ownership of certain buildings. As this concentration of ownership is more acute, cartels and monopolies would be straightforward to implement by tampering with supply to maximize profits for ‘owners’.

However, this is not the current intention of devs, as stated in Dev #11:

‘But since a “building” does not represent a single factory but rather a whole industrial sector across a large area, and we assume the individual businesses in that sector compete with each other rather than engage in cartel behavior to extort consumers, this adjustment of wages to maximize employment makes sense.’

EDIT: Moreover in the same DD dev answers:

‘What is does not let us do is represent unlimited, snowballing accumulation of capital in individuals, as you point out, particularly across several industrial sectors. In its current form, shares in a building can only be owned by Pops in the building's workforce, including Capitalists, Aristocrats, etcetera. This implies that e.g. Capitalists actually do some meaningful work in running the day-to-day operations of a business and therefore cannot simply let their workforce balloon without also creating more opportunities for Capitalists to manage the growing operation in the process. This is not completely representative of reality and is a bit of an idealized take on how market economies operate in practice, but there are several gameplay benefits to using this model and its representation as the default behavior. Snowballing accumulation of capital can still be modelled by reducing the number of available Capitalists job opportunities in a building under certain conditions, and it's not out of the question that something like that will make it in. But I can't say I'm feeling the lack of this in-game right now, Capitalists tend to get plenty powerful in industrializing nations even without the ability to snowball their capital.’

 

[Sbrubbles]

Yeah, having industry concentration be represented in some way would actually be quite interesting, especially if it was tied well to the political aspect of the game.