Mechanic

The mechanic is called "market manipulation" and is supposed to work like this:

• Players can enter the London Stock Exchange (LSE)
• LSE displays the stock prices of 8 to 10 companies and derivatives. This number is relatively small to ensure that players will collide in their efforts to manipulate the market in their favor. The prices are calculated based on
  • real world prices of these companies and derivatives (in real time)
  • any market manipulations that were conducted by the players
  • any market corrections of the system
• Players can buy and sell shares with cash, a resource in the game, at current in-game market value
• Players can manipulate the market, i.e. let the price of a share either rise or fall, by some amount, over a certain period of time. Manipulating the market requires spending certain in-game resources and is therefore limited.
• The system continuously corrects market manipulations by letting the in-game prices converge towards their real world counterparts at a rate of 2% of the difference between the two per hour. Because of this market correction mechanism, pushing up prices (and screwing down prices) becomes increasingly difficult the higher (lower) the price already is.

Goals

• Players are supposed to collide (and have incentives to collide) in their efforts to manipulate the market in their favor, especially when it comes to manipulation efforts by different groups.
• Prices should not resolve around any equilibrium points. The more variance the better.
• Band-wagoning should always involve risk (recognizing that prices start rising should not be a sure sign that they will keep rising so that everybody can make easy profits even when they don't manipulate the market themselves)

Question

Are there any game-theoretic considerations that prevent the mechanic from achieving these goals?