Fluxuating market?

I do not know if this may be useful for you, but if you can add a "market" with slots for the physical items, have a look at Reiner Knizia's PALMYRA, that implements the market in a very nice and easy way:

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/146/buy-low-sell-high

Yes, but it's surely not necessary as this image shows. You could save half the space by simply making it more compact (and a bit ugly). You could save more with providing places for multiple cubes. You could compress it to a small ugly track in which the cubes would be laid side by side. This wouldn't leave enough space for all the numbers, but with slightly different rules there would be no need for that many numbers (e.g., the price changes after each 3 cubes only and the difference between selling and buying prices is fixed, so only a single price need to be printed; this might not work for Wealth of Nations but should impose no problem for a new game).

I'm currently working on a design that faced this same quandary. The solution I settled on was a deck of cards, with each card influencing the price of a single commodity. I found that by balancing the positive and negative cards in the deck, but reshuffling the deck after about 75% of the cards are used, you have a system which self corrects for highs and lows, while still providing interesting price variance which helps replayability. With only 4 commodities, I reveal 5 cards per turn to help the market to feel rather dynamic (although in some cases, cards practically cancel each other out), but you could adjust this number based on the needs of your game.

Another option would be to roll a die for each commodity, with the results of the die changing based on the value of the commodity. So, if we assume a price range of 1-9, if the commodity price is 4-6, the die can swing the price equally in either direction. If the price is 2-3 or 7-8, the price adjustments are mildly adjusted to bring the price back to the center. If the price is 1 or 9, the result of the die will bring the price more firmly back toward the middle. If you have a grid you're tracking prices on, you could color code sections of the grid to show which set of die results players are referencing. I haven't tested this idea at all though.

Of course, neither of these systems take supply and demand into account at all. I decided to make this compromise for my game, since my market is primarily about buying resources at varying prices, and the market would have spiraled out of control. You could take one of these systems and add an element of additional adjustment (i.e. if 2 or more players sell this turn, price is -1), but my experience was that these type of tweaks felt a bit fiddly, at least for my game.

Thanks for the links above. I haven't investigated market mechanics in several months, so I might have to have a look to see if I might like to update a thing or two in my system. Happy designing!

You can look at executive decision. The market is based on the supply and demand created by the players on their turn. No dice, no cubes, just numbers. The game is rather dry but it is another avenue to explore.

I like this idea as a simple representation of supply and demand. The trick will be to determine the correct number of resources to use, since its clearly easier to rapidly depress a price than it is to inflate it. If there are a good variety of resources available, the inflation mechanic will have the chance to fight back and keep things balanced. I'd be very interested to hear how this plays in testing.